Facebook has a problem: to exist, it needs to serve ads to users - the more with video, the better.
Facebook is launching a new lightweight type of ad on Thursday that uses a slideshow of up to seven high-resolution images that fade or flip into one another in a sequence to mimic the experience of a video without the taxing data usage.
The company is hoping that the more attractive advertising options for spotty connections will allow smaller local businesses around the world to buy more cost-effective ads and entice big multinational companies to tailor more of their ads to the developing world.
The move is part of Facebook's first steps towards better selling things to the millions of new users it brought online with tools like the bare-bones Internet.org and Facebook Lite .