Report: Facebook to launch auto-play video ads this week

The next time you can't figure out which tab on your web browser is intrusively playing a video, you might have to check your Facebook tab. 

The world's most populous social network plans to launch advertisements that automatically play sound and video in users' news feeds, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. With the new video ads, Facebook hopes to tap into the advertising market dominated by television and Google, which owns YouTube.

According to the Journal, Facebook is set to formally announce the move Tuesday, but already started testing the technology on some news feeds last week.

The new ads are offically set to appear Thursday, the Journal reported. Up to 15 seconds long, they will play automatically, whether or not you click on them.

Sources tell the paper that the social network had planned to start video advertisements this past summer, but technical glitches delayed the launch.

The delay irked some ad-buyers, who'd made commercials tailored for summertime sales.

Technology blog TechCrunch published excerpts on Friday of a confidential Facebook document detailing its video advertising strategy, promising to offer ad-buyers more attention for their products than television spots garner. The document also described video ads that users would have to click on to watch, differing from what the Journal reported.

What Facebook hopes to do is target advertisements more accurately than television commercials or ads on YouTube, using your personal data, like age, location and gender, along with the interests you've listed on Facebook. If that works, Facebook could likely charge advertisers more.

In the confidential document obtained by TechCrunch, Facebook boasts of an 89 percent advertising accuracy rate.

Facebook users will be hard-pressed to ignore these ads the way they might traditional web ads and even television commercials which so many can fast-forward through using DVR technology. They will be especially prominent on smartphones.

"We aren't talking about video ads on the right column of desktop or even just in desktop News Feed — we are talking about video delivered in the palm of your hand wherever you go," the document states.

"Video that takes up almost the entire mobile screen and plays seamlessly in line. This is video on Facebook."