Facebook’s Video Ads

Autoplayed videos; oh, how I loathe thee! I’ve been grousing about this for years. And now, NOW Facebook wants to launch into the space. Grrrr…

The radio piece I heard this morning didn’t  have much, except stating the auto-play piece. Reading this article on AdAge gives a bit more balance. Apparently, scrolling or swiping past will stop them from playing. And the mobile app won’t play them unless you’re on wifi. I guess that’s better than some of the ways these are executed, but still…

What I find most interesting, though, is their eagerness. Yes, this has a large revenue potential ($1 *10^6/day, plus the ability to deeply refine their  targeting), but, BUTTTTT I don’t know anyone who isn’t annoyed by them. I wonder how much this will alienate users, perhaps driving them somewhere else? Ok, I really don’t think that this will drive a max influx of Google+ users, but I do believe it will drive a lot of people to download Adblock, or one of it’s kindred products.

 

Real Estate and the Web

Been spending a fair amount of time today looking at different website options for my company. At this point, I’m not terribly impressed with any of them. Makes me think I should go and build my own. 

My dream system has all the components of your standard transaction well integrated. CRM, transaction steps, offer tracking, listings, key dates…all that sort of thing, That and tightly integrating our blogs, YouTube channels, Twitter feed, etc. Want to maximize SEO for our work. 

Chatting with some colleagues, I have some other options to explore. The most interesting, to me at least, is the notion of building a whole site on my own via WordPress. Then I would add the functionality I want with plugins. Seems very doable, and would feed my inner (and outer) geek.