Facebook Home will have ads (just not at first)
This week the Android user experience known as Facebook Home has been revealed, and with it, whispers of advertisements served to you front and center. Not unlike what you've seen with Kindle series of tablets, the Facebook Home app will indeed be serving advertisements to you through the lockscreen portion of the UI. What's not known at the moment is if this will be a reality just on the app download version of Home or if it'll be present on the Facebook Phone experience too.
If you'll take a peek at our Facebook Phone vs Facebook Home article you'll find that there are indeed a few differences between the two. With the app download you'll not be getting notifications from all of your apps the way you will with the HTC first smartphone (see our hands-on here!) With advertisements popping up in the Question and Answer portion of the presentation today, we must assume there's another big feature difference between the two.
"There are no ads in this [Facebook Home] yet, I'm sure that one day there will be." – Mark Zuckerberg
After being asked about advertisements and hearing that response, another Facebook team member made it clear that ads would be coming to the Cover Feed portion of the Facebook Home experience. Soon after this, Zuckerberg was asked to repeat whether or not there'd be ads on the Cover Feed – responding with a resounding "yup!", it was made clear that Facebook believes "[advertisements] are just another kind of content."
Another question was asked during the Q and A session on searching:
Q: How will what I search for influence the ads I see?
A: Searches will be tracked in your activity log, and search won't influence ads at all.
So no worries on having your activities tracked in Facebook Home... for advertising through the search bar, anyway. Sound reasonable to you? Let us know if you're all about the Facebook Home experience right this minute!
Have a peek at our new Facebook Home tag portal as well as our Android Hub – we're coming at you from all angles!