Would You Pay for Facebook?
I like Facebook so much that I'd pay for it someday. I came to this conclusion mainly out of concern and the nagging persistence of facts. I've been dogged by the hackneyed, frequently asked question: how will Facebook (and social networks like it) make money? For all the pontificating and analysis, still, nobody has the answer.
Print
The evidence suggests these early social advertising models will fail, and continue to fail — maybe not entirely — but at least against the expectations we've set for them. As a result, and this might be looked upon as blasphemy in the Web 2.0 community, we might have to pay eventually. New media could, ironically, become more like old media in the coming years.
There's been some things about this social advertising model (and ones like it proposed for the future) that seem unsustainable.
When I was at the Web 2.0 Summit more than a month ago, it was all I wanted to talk about, but many of the attendees there didn't. "They'll find a way" or "they're smart guys over there [at Facebook]" were common phrases. Others told me that advertisers saw good returns on putting an ad on top of Facebook.
But facts certainly don't share that sentiment. In this New York Times story, citing IDC research, we learned that "just 57 percent of all users of social networks clicked on an ad in the last year, and only 11 percent of those clicks led to a purchase, IDC said. And it turns out that marketers are not so interested in advertising on pages filled with personal trivia and relationship updates."
Many say Facebook has strong potential to monetize because it's more powerful from an advertising perspective to see what your friends buy (such as a scarf, to use one of the cited examples in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 60 Minutes Interview last year), opposed to just searching for an item on Google and getting random text-based ads.
Call me an old Web 1.0 media hack, but I still bet on the stability of the latter delivery model over what Facebook wants to do.
There's a couple fundamental problems with this proposed social advertising model that keep getting ignored, or pushed aside, because they're inconvenient for social media evangelists and the third party application firms riding Facebook's coattails to explain. One (and this is channeling my inner-Obama) is the myth of the younger generation's apathy, in this case towards privacy. Because Facebook originated in college, and garnered that group as its core constituency before blossoming into what it is today, social media enthusiasts and marketers assume this generation's propensity to share anything and everything is unwavering. What an amazing paradigm shift! they exclaimed. Imagine them just broadcasting their buying habits for you!
The Beacon advertising incident stunted that wave of euphoria, and Zuckerberg and company intelligently (and rightly) began adding robust privacy features to Facebook afterward.
I'm not sure they truly believe users care that much, however. After Beacon, the message to users was, "oh, we have to go back to the drawing board and get this right. Sorry." But what that really meant was this: "Actually, that really is how we want to do it, so, um, yeah, we'll just structure it a little differently so you'll think it's different." So they've called it something else. We still have Beacon, or the potential for it. The only difference is it's called social ads and we have opt out capabilities.
Previous Post: Facebook Is Moving Out of the Dorm and Into the OfficeNext Post: Web 2.0, Social Networks in '09: The Year of Consolidation, Not Innovation
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
