Maybe someone could explain this to me. Why doesn't Facebook let us monetarize our time online by enabling us to display ads, either of our choice or served by agencies, on our Facebook pages?
This is what they have to do if they want to pull forward out of their not-so-spectacular IPO.
Here's this nice walled garden, Facebook, with 850 million users plus. I use it and like it up to a point, although I'm not uncritical. It's sure a lot nicer than G+, which is like an anti-social network instead of a social network, filled with Google engineers and other Silicon Valley snobs.
So there's these ads on the side which sometimes are bought by people I know, but apparently also pitched to me based on my user data and posts (and why it keeps pushing these dating services with men age 50-60 at me I'll never know, as I will never click on them).
Apparently you can make these ads at least change and go away if they fetch up Sarah Palin or something you don't like, by clicking through "smart menus" that ask you questions why you didn't like the ads. Ok, all well and good.
What's missing, however, is ads that I can monetarize. You know, like Google AdSense.
Why can't I get a script, or operate some sort of prefabricated template on my settings page, and pick ads off a dashboard I would like to show on my page somewhere in a box at the top, or inside each post?
So let's say I could do a post about a product if I like it -- say, Siggy's Skyr, a sort of Icelandic kefir which is my latest enthusiasm and which none of the stores where I shop can keep on the shelves, it is so popular, even at $1.99 on sale for the little cup of it.
The ad from the Siggy's people would fetch up in my post, or I'd park it at the top of my page, and each time one of my friends clicked through to the central Siggy's page, or maybe printed out a coupon and used it or something, I'd get a piece of that revenue.
They could call it AdFace or AdBook. AdFace, because it's putting a human face on ads, because you're putting it right in your feed.
While all the snobby geeks of Silicon Valley who hate commerce (except their own) and the various technocommies who loathe ads would hate this, most normal people would love it.
Already spontaneously, without being paid to do so, I see my friends and relatives "liking" Target or "liking" some other brand of tea or something -- without prompting. I see them over on the side doing that all the time.
Imagine if they could start to get paid pennies a day or dollars a day from clicks.
I don't see what's not to like here.
Facebook isn't just a chat room or a social network with just relationship chatter. It's a newsfeed and for a lot people it's really their blog. I know hundreds of Russians now using Facebook as a blog because Live Journal hangs and stalls or gets blocked occasionally, and they don't want to depend on Russian services like Vkontakte which might be removed by the authorities.
There isn't quite enough room for a blog post such as I would do, but it's long enough, and you can always write the longer thing on the "Notes". And for some people, their photos *are* their blogs; their shares *are* their blogs -- their news feed. Good! A little ad around it wouldn't hurt.
People who say they hate ads and don't want to click on them and don't click existing ads of Facebook now off to the side will change their minds in a heartbeat the minute you LET THEM MONETARIZE the ads themselves, and chose them so that they naturally flow into what they're doing.
Facebook has to cut us in on the revenue stream. We're the workers here on this collective farm. We need to get paid. We need to stop this communist thing where we pretend to work on Farmville, and they pretend to pay us by having friends help us level up in Farmville.
I've been reading Doug Edward's book about the early years of Google, I'm Feeling Lucky, and it's clear that it really took off the revenue charts when first it cut in partners from portals like Yahoo, and then it cut in ordinary people by letting them put ads on their blogs or web sites.
This just has to happen. It will happen. It will even happen in different ways, with different aps, because the place where Facebook needs to have it happen badly is on mobile phones. An ad interrupting your feed on a mobile phone is 10 times more irritating when you thumb through it than an off to the side on the page on a computer screen. People always tell me they hate ads on mobile feeds of blogs, even though the reality is, they click on them more.
I suspect the answer to my question is this: Zuckerberg likely thinks he can get us to chat about products and put them into our feed without paying us a red cent. Because we do anyway. And that probably he will only go in the direction of aps or services on the page that let you easily Facebook-share when you buy something.
But while that's going to work for some people, the way to make money is to stop exploiting everybody's labour like communists in the collective media farm, and let us monetarize our time online.
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