TECHCRUNCH
ERICK SCHONFELD
08 AUG 08
If you’ve bothered to look at the ads on Facebook lately (don’t worry, nobody else looks at them either), you might have noticed little thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons at the bottom of each ad. If you click on one of these, a box pops up asking why you liked or didn’t like the ad. This presumably will help Facebook target ads at you more effectively in the future.
The ad-rating feature was quietly rolled at least two months ago
. But it seems a bit redundant. After all, ads already come with a natural, built-in rating system. If an ad resonates with me, then I will click on it. If it doesn’t, I won’t.
But ads on social networks in general perform so poorly that perhaps Facebook is hoping to get some feedback from the 90-percent-plus of members who never click on a particular ad. In effect, Facebook is throwing up its arms and asking consumers diercty: why do our ads suck so much?