Social-networking giant, Facebook, has revealed that they will be phasing out their controversial Sponsored Stories by April 9 this year.
Last year in August,
Facebook settled a privacy suit from 2011 by paying a
$20 million settlement to a class action group for allegedly violating privacy norms. In fact, prior to settling the lawsuit in June 2013, Facebook had already announced their decision to drop Sponsored Stories.
While Facebook is trying hard to pip Google in terms of generating revenues through online advertising and marketing, the sponsored stories caused a lot of damage to their reputation. The reason being Facebook could repackage some of the customer's actions on Facebook and let advertisers sell them to your friends without your permissions.
Incidentally Facebook is understood to be happy about the same given that they had to settle the $20 million lawsuit in 2013. Back in June 2013, there were 13 different types of sponsored stories. This had fallen from 27.
Facebook has also introduced changes on their webpage for Facebook developers, so that they could follow the new guidelines when it comes to creating new marketing and advertisements for the website. Advertisement with explicit consent from the user has been deemed illegal by a California Civil Code, and simply checking Facebook's Terms of Service is not enough.
In just over two years since the initial claims, Sponsored Stories have netted Facebook over $234 million. Facebook has detailed on their Facebook Developers page, the changes that need to be incorporated for the same by developers as a part of the Breaking Change Policy. Broken down under specific subheads the page details the changes that will be made to the target audiences, the geographical targeting system amongst others.
Facebook also claims that this will eventually be beneficial for advertisers who can zero in on what is truly useful for their businesses, rather than using Sponsored Stories.