News Feed Is Facebook’s New Jackpot ⇥ theatlanticwire.com

Rebecca Greenfield, The Atlantic:

For the users trying today’s rollout of the new News Feed, the bigger images all over the homepage are obvious, but it’s the super-sized ads that are truly impossible to ignore. On a test this afternoon, the following sponsored post from Rosetta Stone popped up as the second item in my News Feed. It takes up massive real estate in the main feed, and when combined with the other right-rail ads, that’s a full two-thirds of a computer screen of advertising, which accounted for 84 percent of Facebook’s revenues last quarter.

Two-thirds of the screen area is consumed by advertisements, but entirely all of the content on screen that is not basic navigation is advertising. The new News Feed is beautiful and engaging, but it desperately pushes ads to the absolute forefront.