Facebook Revenue Ideas sinking from Awful to Worse

I always argued that free was a bad starting point for companies wishing to make money.  Then Google came along and showed how it could be done.  Then social media came along and charging for anything became a form of blasphemy.

So I have some sympathy for he mess that Facebook is in. I stayed out of the dog-kicking fracas when they introduced Beacon, which I hoped was the worst idea the world's most promising social network would come close to.

But I was wrong again. TechCrunch says that Ads-Click has introduced MicroSocialAds on Facebook.This is a 3rd party ap that pays you to spam your pals. I can hear the drool dropping from the jowls of the Pay per Post Crowd. Why should Facebook care?  Because it brings in one more avenue of crap that I may have to deal with if I stay with Facebook.

For me, Facebook is starting to remind me of an old college romance. It was torrid at first and I thought it was true love. But then there came a series of unpleasant surprises in her behavior. One morning I woke up and discovered she who had been so lovely so recently had become downright ugly to me.


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Comments

[betsy yates]

So the next morning, you woke up next to Facebook and before doing the Walk of Shame back to your dorm room, you realized her bad breath overpowered your infatuation? I can get with that.

[shel israel]

Worse, I thought she was loyal to me. I thought I could trust her with my secrets. But in fact, I found out she could be had by anyone who paid the price. And my secrets were not safe with her.

[Joseph Thornley]

It makes you want to run back to your own [global] neighbourhood. Where you have some influence over the rules...

[Douglas Karr]

My earliest notions of Facebook was that it was trying to be the 'new AOL'. In the early days, AOL tried to keep their users internal and away from the Internet.

They built applications and pages in AOL on behalf of advertisers - and then started to really get greedy. There were ads everywhere!

It's cool that Facebook built its own application framework, don't get me wrong. As a user, though, I don't WANT to stay in Facebook all day. Applications were built in Facebook to meet facebook's requirements - not the users... which just makes for bad apps!

The mix of technologies and their connective ability on the web is part of it's lure. Each site can be built totally different from the one before, but still accessible via a browser. Why do we need to 'improve' on this?

[Sean Moffitt]

Shel,

I like the college romance metaphor so I'll stick with it ...regardless whether you managed to stay with your college sweetheart, you eventually both probably recognized over the next 1,2,3,4 years that you had to get serious and make a living.

That is Facebook's predicament...

So, I would like for once the people that beat down Beacon (which was a dumb but recoverable idea) and other social network hits and misses to come up with some inspiration on how what they hate can make money in a more digestable manner.

And please don't say a static ad model - the very reason why you like it (unobtrusive, avoidable) is because it doesn't work....

Love your stuff Shel...but have seen one too many critique recently without anybody proposing an alternative...that's more social media Siskel & Ebert than Speilberg and Hitchcock.

[Alexander van Elsas]

@Sean and @Shel,
I think the main issue lies in the wrong business model. Current web 2.0 companies tend to favor the free but ad-based business model, but in most cases this only leads to walled gardens and network monetization instead of providing user value. Google really is the only company that can leverage that model because their walled garden is the size of the entire web. Facebook SocialAds won't work because in most cases the ads themselves do not provide the user any value (only makes sense in search). Beacon missed out on that as well. MicroSocialAds are probably even worse. Not only do you spam your Facebook "friends" but making yourself a living out of it is a joke. You would need a whole lot of so called friends and an incredible amount of traffic and clicks to do just that. But the question is, are you willing to let your credibility and trust go down the drain for a few bucks? I doubt it. Wrote about that this morning. Current web 2.0 thinking is mediocre, lazy and opportunistic. Sad, really. There are better business models, most of them based upon creating revenues via user value (and I did try to describe a few ;-))