Come April 9, 2014, Facebook will finally be putting an end to its Sponsored Story ads that never went down well with users of the social network. With Sponsored Stories, Facebook takes what the user does on the social network and sells it to advertisers, who might or might not use it as part of their advertisement campaign. The cleverness about this practice is that Facebook packages these advertisements in such a way that makes it appear as if the user is recommending it to their friends and family.
For many who know about the ads, they are pointless and take up a lot of space inside the browser; space that could have been used for other important things. Thankfully though, the Sponsored Stories ad option will be gone in three months, though it is not yet certain if it will be replaced by something else that is less intrusive and deceiving to the user, or even the other way around.
The first time Facebook introduced Sponsored Stories was way back in 2011. It didn't go as smoothly as expected after the company was hit with a class action lawsuit that claimed the Sponsored ads violated user rights and privacy by publicizing their online behavior and likes without the option to get out of it. According to the court document read by Reuters, Facebook made over $230 million from Sponsored Stories between Jan. 2011 to August 2012.
In August of 2013, Facebook settled the suit for $20 million, along with agreeing to give users "more control over how their content is shared," according to a Reuters report. It is understood the settlement only amounted to 2 cents per Facebook user.
It seems as if Facebook is able to make enough money from its other ad units to make up for the loss the social network will experience with the removal of Sponsored Stories.
Strangely enough though, Facebook's main competitor, Google, announced a new product that is the same thing as Facebook's Sponsored Stories. This new product is called Shared Enforcements. It will be interesting to see how users of Google+ and other Google products react to this.
