So some bright spark at Facebook has come up with yet another inventive way to bombard its users with advertising. According to “sources familiar with the matter” who spoke to Bloomberg, the social media giant is about to unleash TV style video commercials onto everyone’s news feed by the end of the year.

The idea isn’t actually a new one – Facebook was first reported to be studying if it could get away with 15-second video ads back in December 2012. The suggestion was that the ads would be slipped into user’s news feeds, and once the unwitting user came across them they would expand to cover most of the page. Even worse, the earlier reports stated that the ads would likely be on autoplay, meaning they fire up the moment you scroll down and see them. Even worse, the video ads would also pop on Facebook’s mobile app, which means that anyone not using Wi-Fi on their phone would almost certainly be subject to an intrusion that cripples their device, at least momentarily.

Since those first reports, the video ad rumors subsided somewhat, but that doesn’t mean Facebook buried its plans. Rather, its been working in secret to come up with a way of making them as “unobtrusive” as possible (fat chance of that), while it’s also been sounding out advertisers who’re willing to stump up between $1 million and $2.5 million a day to run the ads.

The good news? Well, ummm, apart from the fact that this will be incredibly annoying for 99% of all Facebook users, at least we’ll, ummm… We’ll only be subject to this torture three times a day. Perhaps…

But looking at this ‘feature’ objectively for a moment, there’s a small chance it might not be all that bad. We must remember that Facebook possesses the kind of data about its users that advertisers would (and do) pay through the nose for, and this could at least help to soften the blow. With everything that Facebook knows about you and your personal tastes, preferences and interests, there’s a ‘chance’ that the ads might be mildly interesting. If we’re lucky…

However, we should also note that anyone else who’s tried to foist video ads onto web users has struggled to do it successfully. YouTube’s occasional ads (when it forces you to watch a commercial before the actual clip you want to see) have proved to be deeply unpopular, to the point that it was forced to move to a “cost per view” pricing scheme because so few people actually watch them all the way through.

Looking forward to this?

On SiliconANGLE NewsDesk this morning, Senior Managing Editor Kristen Nicole discussed the likelihood of Facebook actually going ahead with these plans.

“Looking at the bigger picture here, there’s a lot that’s going on with Smart TVs and connected TVs.  A good chunk of what people are already doing with televisions is shifting to the Internet.  Online video in general is continuing to grow. So really what we’re seeing is a transition from one media front to another and this is going to be a very interesting transition for those looking to capitalize on this effort, particularly for Facebook,” she stated.

“It will be really interesting to see what Facebook does here and how they look to monetize that. From these latest reports that have come out this morning, it seems Facebook is at least curious and interested in replicating a portion of television advertising for the Internet whether or not that works, time will tell.”

For more of Kristen’s analysis, see the clip below:

Almost inevitably, there’s going to be a huge backlash against Facebook if it does go ahead with its plans. No doubt it’ll tinker with things for a while based on the feedback it receives, adjusting the format until people either get sick to death of them or (more likely) just accept them as a fact of life. That will depend on whether or not Facebook can withstand the negative publicity – previously it’s been forced to backtrack on new ‘features’ that were seen to be too intrusive. The Beacon advertising platform which gave advertisers permission to publish what users had bought directly onto their sites comes to mind as a case in point.

Mark Zuckerberg later admitted that Beacon was a “mistake”, but even so outside websites continue to track users on Facebook, and the practice has now become a vital source of revenue for it. It’ll be interesting to see the scale of the public outcry when FB finally does roll out its video ads, and whether or not users feelings about them will be taken into consideration.