With free services invariably comes advertising — after all, the commercials you have to put up with on network television are funded by advertisers. However, Facebook apparently thinks you don’t see enough ads throughout your day, which explains why it’s expanding its advertising with the formal launch of Audience Network.
Audience Network is an ad platform that will allow Facebook to extend their advertising past the confines of Facebook.
If you’re an advertiser, all you have to do is sign up for Audience Network, and you will have your advertisements pop-up to mobile users that sign in to websites using their Facebook credentials. After that, the mobile user will see ads selected by advertisers to the user on any website they choose to use their credentials as a log-in.
In a blog post, Facebook software engineer Tanya Chen explains, “The Audience Network shows people the right ads by extending Facebook’s targeting to third-party apps,” Chen goes on. “This means the ads match the interests of people, just as they do on Facebook. It also means people are more likely to engage with the ads.”
As with most advertising on Facebook, it promises to give mobile users only the most relevant ads when logging into sites. This means that they’re more in sync with the content of the site you’re on and not an unrelated ad that has nothing to do with the site’s content.
As ads become more and more integrated into our devices, this appears yet another annoying progression into online media being more dominated by advertising.
