According to an article in The Telegraph Facebook planned to monetise itself by becoming a targeted market research tool, allowing companies to conduct research about their new products directly through a polling system called Engagement ads. This targeting would supposedly be based on such user details as whether they are gay or straight, single or married and male or female.

Nick O’Neil later reported that The Telegraph misrepresented what Zuckerberg had said.

“There are two systems right now: the reuse of Facebook’s previous polling system which was displayed at the World Economic Forum and the new polling engagement ads.”

‘Engagement ads’ are based on a polling system that allows the user to interact with the ad as they login and is ‘opt-in’ instead of ‘opt-out’. Facebook has been testing the product since the end of last year in order to avoid infuriating their users but also creating the best possible market research tool for companies.

Facebook has stated that they will only be reusing the old polling system (which is no longer available to users) and employing research tools that already exist. These tools include Facebook Lexicon, which is similar to Google Trends, and allows users to track trends based on the visible aspects of people’s pages.

Facebook certainly wants to avoid the perception that they would offer their users as unknowing market research subjects, especially after the failure of Facebook Beacon. If there is a market research strategy at play, it would have to be subtler than The Telegraph suggests.
 

Image by World Economic Forum, under CC