Facebook Moves Cautiously on Video Ads

Facebook Inc. has been planning for months to dive into the lucrative market for online video ads. The holdup: CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to annoy its 1.1 billion members.

As soon as this fall, Facebook plans to launch a video-ad service that will play 15-second-or-less clips on members’ home page news feeds on both smartphones and the Web, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Facebook needs the ads to be sufficiently splashy that they will convince brands to fork over roughly $2 million per day.

Yet since earlier this year, Mr. Zuckerberg and his engineers have toiled over how to make the ads not so distracting and slow that they alienate users, according to current and former employees and advertisers.

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