Facebook has released a statement that starting next year, you will be seeing fewer posts from the brands and businesses you have chosen to follow (and likely more of the ads Facebook is paid to push that you never asked for).

 

"Beginning in January 2015, people will see less of this type of content in their News Feed," Facebook said in a blog post. "As we’ve said before, News Feed is already a competitive place — as more people and pages are posting content, competition to appear in News Feed has increased. All of this means that pages that post promotional creative [content] should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time."

 

It said these posts are nothing more than spam. This is, of course, true, except that users can opt out of following any brand they feel is not providing value added content in their News Feed. 

 

"What we discovered is that a lot of the content people see as too promotional is posts from pages they like, rather than ads," Facebook said in the post. "This may seem counterintuitive but it actually makes sense: News Feed has controls for the number of ads a person sees and for the quality of those ads (based on engagement, hiding ads, etc.), but those same controls haven’t been as closely monitored for promotional page posts. Now we’re bringing new volume and content controls for promotional posts, so people see more of what they want from pages."

 

In other words: Facebook is not making any money off of these posts.

 

This will make things more dofficult for adult companies who are currently not allowed to buy ad space on Facebook. Further limiting the reach of posts on the popular social networking site could mean a decrease in reaching valuable new consumers. 

 

“EDGErank, the algorithm that affects what appears in the News Feed, is going to become even more important as pages are forced to participate in ads for increased visibility,” explained Lauren MacEwen from 7veils.com. “Most adult companies are not able to place an ad on Facebook, even if it is simply to drive likes to a page."

 

She added: “This may be limiting; however Facebook has been limiting to adult for a long time. Most adult companies are not allowed to share links to their content, or often even SFW blog posts depending on the topic of their post or the name of their site. ... I think the upcoming push for ads is going to force pages, adult and non-adult, to focus on the quality of their shared content and engagement."

 

So follow us on Facebook - where we share interesting articles and pics of sexy guys - while you can. (And you wouldn't consider links to hot men fucking to be spam, would you? Of course not!)