Friday, March 28, 2014

Facebook, Oculus. Why not?

I've seen so many articles speculating about why Facebook would want to by Oculus. Theories about different ways to delivery Facebook feeds, through to Facebook wanting to compete in the gaming market.

I've come to the conclusion that it's probably a lot more fundamental than this. It's about Ads.

Facebook is an Advertising company, it's how they make their money. Oculus are working on creating a highly immersive environment that can be used for games, research, manufacturing, you name it. Now imagine having ads in this highly immersive environment. Full field of vision, no distractions. Just you and an Ad, pretty much a captive market.

This might seem a little over the top, but just imagine waiting for a game or other VR app to load, and having a nice big Ad beamed right into your head. Surely it's the holy grail for ad delivery.

I could be wrong on this, they may just be looking at having ads inside games, like other companies have been working on for years. But just the simple fact that this is a fully immersive environment, the value of the ads would have to be much higher that what they can currently get.

Makes perfect sense to me.