Facebook announces major advertising revamp on concerns over offensive content

In a bid to deal with concerns about offensive content, Facebook has announced a major revamp of its advertising systems.

There would now be new restrictions on where adverts appeared on the site.

Marks and Spencer and BSkyB were among companies that suspended advertising after complaints that ads had been placed on pages with offensive material.

The social network now plans to remove any advertising from many of its pages.

Facebook's move comes after a Sky promoting an M&S voucher.

The advert was placed on a Facebook page called "cute and gay boys" featuring photographs of teenage boys.

In a blogpost yesterday, Facebook said: "We recognize we need to do more to prevent situations where ads are displayed alongside controversial Pages and Groups. So we are taking action."

According to the company, from Monday it would implement a new process to determine which pages or groups should feature adverts alongside the content.

Pages featuring any violent, graphic or sexual content, even if such content did not fall foul of the company's rules would have no adverts.

BBC reports citing a source, as saying Facebook would create a "gold standard" of around 10,000 pages that were deemed suitable for adverts, and then inspect other pages to see if they could be added to the list. All adverts would be removed from other pages.

Meanwhile, ever since Facebook introduced its ad exchange last year, advertisers had been flocking to run ads targeted at users based on the websites they had visited in recent hours or days. However, until last month, those ads could run only on the less-noticed right-hand side of the page, not down the middle in the prime space called news feed.

Now that advertisers can run these so-called retargeted ads–spots served to users based on their recent web travels, rather than on their interests gleaned from their Facebook activities - in the news feed, these have turned out to be a veritable goldmine, a new report from retargeting firm AdRoll reveals.

The company reviewed campaigns from 547 advertisers serving over 1 billion ''impressions,'' or views of ads, since May, and compared three types of retargeted ads: those served on the right-hand side from the Facebook Exchange, exchange ads served into the news feed, and standard retargeted web ads.

The report found that retargeted ads in the news feed had a click rate over 50 times than those on the right-hand side and over 20 times that of standard web ads. Also the prices of those news feed ads were half those on the right-hand side and a fifth of web ads.