Today Facebook began rolling out its newest update: Sponsored stories will begin appearing in the news ticker, that annoying, never-ending additional noise contributor located in the upper-righthand corner of your Facebook homepage.
Dropping sponsored stories into the news ticker was the next logical move for Facebook. But users weren’t happy about the news ticker launch in the first place. It received a ton of complaints; teens, for one, called it a stalker tool. Now the news ticker is more akin to a spammer tool.
The big secret here is that sponsored stories already appear in the news feed. Facebook surfaces them based on a user’s page likes, page posts, page post likes, check-ins, app shares, apps used, games played and domain stories. There is no way to opt-out of them completely, but you can click on the little “X” in the upper right-hand corner of those stories if you want to hide them. We reached out to a Facebook spokesperson who confirmed that sponsored stories would work the same in the news ticker: “The X on Sponsored Stories in ticker behaves much like the X on Sponsored Stories or other ads elsewhere on the site. You can hide the individual story, or all stories from that Page or App.”
Before the official news ticker rollout, sponsored stories were only showing up on the canvas pages of apps, or the pages that appear when users are playing a game or using an app.
Are you peeved about sponsored stories in your news ticker? Tell us how you feel in the comments below.
