If you've been on Facebook the last two days, you may have noticed that instead of the steady stream of ads for correspondence schools and men or women in your age group, there's a different kind of "ad" which is an advertisement for something totally generic not related to a company that you can "like". They're just key words.
Last night it was "Jesus Christ" and "walking" that came on my page, possibly because I put a religion in my profile (Catholic) and mentioned going on a hike or something in my posts and pictures.
Today I've got "God" and "horseback riding," although I don't think I've been on a horse since I was five years old. I think it's probably from all those posts about Turkmenistan, homeland of the famous Ahal-tekhe race horses, and Berdymukhamedov riding on a horse, possibly.
"God" already has more than 6 million "likes," but you wonder how He is going to hold out, with "horseback riding" already getting "2 million" and "sex" (if that is displayed) probably slated to get 850 million.
What is this all about? Well, it's Facebook testing some kind of new key-word advertising thingie that will be the salvation of social media -- seeding ads into key-words that people will "like". We don't know how exactly they'll do this, but it's the rabbit that Mark Zuckerberg has to pull out of the magic hat of the Facebook IPO.
Everyone is watching to see how he is going to turn the IPO wealth ($19 billion) which led to a lot of broken hearts for investors who weren't inside the winner's circle but which enables Zuckerberg now to do various things -- like poach Apple engineers; like buy or make a phone of his own to be a branded Facebook phone which the cool kids say will suck -- but which most people would buy, like they buy smart phones now on the basis of how they are displayed in stores with the Facebook app already bundled into them.
And do whatever it is they are doing with these generic "like" words.
What will that thing be and will we hate it?
As I said, I don't care what they do, as long as they cut me in on the monetarizing like Google's AdSense. I want a FaceSense or an AdFace and I'm good.
But knowing how Silicon Valley works, I bet they won't do anything of the sort, cutting in the masses that they prefer to provide free accounts in exchange for surrendering masses of personal data and free content-production labour.
Well, masses of personal data that isn't "semantic". As I said, I don't like horses. I just happened to have written probably a half dozen articles about Turkmenistan involving horses that were linked on my FB via Twitter posts.
Right now, when a friend or relative "likes" something out there like the store Target, I see their "liking" of this brand when I go over to look at a picture and its comments, for example. I might then add my "like". What that gives the store is hard to see -- and maybe that's why GM pulled out $10 million of ads because they didn't see it, either. We can all "like" endlessly something that we might not click through to even see, let alone buy.
Hence the Groupon coupon thing and the deals and steals -- but there has gotta be another way.
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