By Queenie Wong, East Bay Times
Facebook knows your age, the food you like and has a wealth of user data that has helped fuel the tech firm's multibillion-dollar advertising business.
Now the company is adding another strategy to its advertising playbook: targeting nonusers.
In 2014, the company released an advertising tool called "Facebook Audience Network" that allowed businesses to show ads in some third-party apps and websites. But that "network" only reached people with Facebook accounts.
On Thursday, the tech firm said marketers will be now able to show ads to everyone who visits a site or app within the network — even if they're not one of Facebook's 1.6 billion users.
"We've all had this experience. You open a news article on your phone's Web browser, and the page takes unusually long to load. Once it appears, the article is blocked by an ad. You might see a tiny "x" to hide the ad, but if you tap in the wrong spot, you get redirected to an app store or another website," wrote Andrew Bosworth, vice president of Facebook's ads and business platform, in a blog post about the topic.
"Advertising may be here to stay, but bad advertising like this doesn't have to," he added.
While broadening the reach of its ads could also help Facebook compete with Alphabet, the parent company of Google, some analysts think the sales generated from ads targeted at nonusers will be small.
Facebook raked in $5.38 billion in total revenue in the first quarter, a large chunk of which came from mobile ads.
"My guess is that the majority of people who aren't on Facebook are probably light Internet users, and you have a small share of the population who is accounting for an even smaller share of consumption. It's pretty marginal, I think, in terms of benefit," said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research.
Facebook targets ads based on a person's activity and interest on the social network, such as fashion or fitness and tracks if they "liked" a page or shared a post about a certain topic or business.
But those who are annoyed by seeing certain ads can also opt out by changing their ad preferences in Facebook's settings. If someone doesn't have a Facebook account, they can opt out by tapping the AdChoices icon next to an Audience Network ad, the company said.
More than 3 million businesses advertise on Facebook.
©2016 the Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
