YOU MIGHT NOT ACTUALLY MIND FACEBOOK’S OVERHAULED ADS

IT’S ALWAYS HARDER than it should be to remember what Facebook used to look like. There wasn’t always a Timeline, or even a News Feed. But even way back in the beginning, around 2004 or 2005, Facebook had ads. They sat on the left-hand side of the page and were digital approximations of ads for the university chess club. “We were selling them on college campuses,” says Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer. “We sold them to the same people who were buying ads in college papers. They were exactly what you would see on bulletin boards across college campuses.”

They were, to put it bluntly, not exactly inspired. But the fact that ads were part of Facebook’s earliest iterations—before Instagram, photo tagging, or even the Wall—is significant. Even then, before the flashy branding we see in the News Feed today, Facebook ads were a hot commodity. “A lot of the power of using Facebook [for advertising] is that they can target the kind of people they care about versus targeting everybody,” says Cox. In 2004, this meant college kids—sure, you could narrow things down by location, age, school, major, or gender even then, but now Facebook offers advertisers far more ways to slice and dice their audiences, especially since 2012, when advertisers gained access to the News Feed, the biggest prize of all.