Last week Facebook started rolling out a long overdue news feed update.  It hasn’t shown up in my news feed quite yet but my daughter was blessed with it last night.

The official Facebook story is that the new news feed was redesigned to improve user experience.  While I’m sure that this is true, I can’t help but notice that the sidebar ads are much more noticeable with this update.  This gives me a sneaking suspicion that the real reason for the change is to increase ad revenue.

Let’s take a look at the changes:

A.  Images take up a lot more space in this news-feed.  The display is beautiful and definitely engaging.

B.  Sidebar ads are more noticeable.  No surprise here as, ads are the bread and butter of the Facebook business model and, as a public company, the business model must focus on developing and enhancing revenue.  This is probably good news for advertisers – more noticeable ads should equate to a higher response rate (assuming that your ad copy is relevant.)

C.  Sponsored stories seem to “pop” in the news feed in a very natural way.  Again, this is good news for page owners.  News feed ads consistently convert more effectively than sidebar ads, so most likely, the new layout will increase the effectiveness of your Facebook ads.

What do you think of the new Facebook page layout?  Do you love or hate it?