Paid News in Face Book

Facebook this week started testing a system that lets users pay to promote their posts. Out of all the various different features the social networking giant has trialed on its website, this idea is by far the worst one yet. It sounds like an April Fools’ joke, but it isn’t.

“We’re constantly testing new features across the site,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “This particular test is simply to gauge people’s interest in this method of sharing with their friends.”

The tests are being carried out in New Zealand, a popular Facebook choice for testing something before a broader rollout. I’m hoping the tests don’t go well, and Facebook users make it clear to the company they don’t want to pay to highlight their stories.

Your typical News Feed story reaches just 12 percent of your friends. That’s just the average: a story can become less or more popular depending on various metrics used by the News Feed algorithm.

That’s the beauty of it: my Facebook friends get to decide if my latest status update is important enough for other Facebook friends to see. If I post something boring, it doesn’t get promoted as much because fewer people Like it, comment on it, and so on. If I post something interesting, more people engage with it, and thus more people get to see it.

Highlight would destroy that. As you can see in the screenshot above, courtesy of Stuff, the potential new feature lets you pay a small fee to ensure that your story is visible to more of your Facebook friends.

Paid post promotion already exists on Facebook. It’s called advertising. That’s what Facebook Pages are for, not Facebook profiles.

Earlier this year, Facebook started pushing “Featured” ads in the News Feed. Here is the official description of Featured Stories from the Facebook Help Center:


Source:zdnet.com