Facebook Sells Your Friends | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Sells Your Friends

businessweek.com

49 pointspathik20 comments

From the article: "'I can target my exact audience, rather than trying to come up with a proxy for it,' like looking at search terms or which websites people visit, says Belden, who was spending about $4,000 a month on Facebook earlier in the year before he was forced to rein in his marketing expenses because of budget issues."

Maybe I am misreading this, but in context this seems to say that the guy thinks Facebook offers better value than any other advertising platform, but STILL doesn't make him enough money that he can afford to keep using it. Doesn't Facebook have to help people make money for it to continue to gain advertising revenue?

This guy is assuming he's doing a better job of finding people who would be interested in his product on Facebook than he could via Google. He's probably wrong. Search queries are a better metric for determining intent than demographics are.

Demand generation vs demand fulfillment. Once people are looking to buy something search ads are a great way to connect with them, but it's hard to reach them if they aren't yet searching.

Facebook can offer what Yahoo did in the late 90s, early 2000s - a large audience and a consistent, high quality content for billions of impressions.

Since the advertising world is divided into pay for performance ads and branding ads, Facebook can choose which to suit when. Google serves the first and YouTube serves the second.

Public statements and actions both affirm Facebook's lack of true focus on any particular advertiser base. To date, my bet is that most of the revenue coming through the systems is performance based advertising for games like Zynga who is rumored to be spending double digit millions monthly on FB ads.

Duh?

How many times have there been articles and posts about how its users are not Facebook's customers. Facebook is monetized on advertising, selling their users' personal data.

And yet it's completely false. Facebook does not sell personal data. Advertisers pay to display ads -- they don't get info about you.

I should have put "personal" in quotes. Yes, we have no evidence that they're sharing private data, but they certainly are using the information users willingly share to sell ads. There's nothing wrong with that at all, but I suspect most of their users don't realize that's the primary monetization method right now.

Come on, Paul. Do you really believe that Facebook is building this vast social graph and treasure trove of personal information, and they'll not try to exploit it in every way they can for huge profits? That's really what we're talking about here.

Facebook can spin it any way they like, but in the end they will have to invade everyone's privacy in order to make money. There's just no other value on that site. There are lots of brilliant engineers at Facebook, but it seems they are kept so preoccupied with "hacking" that they don't recognize the evil empire they're helping to build.

This is pure speculation on your part. You could replace Facebook with Google and make the exact same argument.

Let's keep outrage for when outrageous things happen.

And we also haven't seen evidence of a great monetizing juggernaut... yet.

This might be naive, but a monthly subscription model might work for facebook. Then you'd have no more ads, no more privacy snafus--the goals of the company would be aligned with the goals of the users because the users would be customers. It's simple. Would it tick off some users? Sure, but that hasn't stopped facebook in the past.

I'd pay $10/month for a facebook that cares about me as a customer. Right now I don't use it because facebook's goals aren't aligned with mine, even though it's a valuable service.

But $10/month per user probably wouldn't be enough revenue to match facebook's high valuation.

> But $10/month per user probably wouldn't be enough revenue to match facebook's high valuation.

What, five billion a month would not be enough? Of course, no one is going to pay for Facebook, mostly because some people aren't going to pay for Facebook and when some people aren't there, no one is.

That's a good point... makes me wonder if any sufficiently-large social-communication site can ever make money without heavy ad revenue.

Still hoping for a distributed setup, personally. Then site A can sell features + integrations Q - BZ, and B can be free but only do A - D.

Great point. It gives me an idea: you could turn it on its head and make the subscription price the main feature. $200/month allows you access to the super-exclusive social network. ;)

Haven't you heard of executive dating services? ;)

Worth reading fully. The last sentence speaks volumes...

"And it's not yet clear how those hundreds of millions of people will feel when they realize they've been permanently joined on the site by advertisers who are not all that interested in friendship."

I'm looking at my facebook page.

The ads are for: two online degrees which I don't need, (having an advanced degree that FB should know about) and one cheap TV offer, which I don't want since I don't watch TV.

I can see zero evidence of ads being targeted to me, even though I in the past I clicked "like" and "dislike" on ads in the vein hope they'd become more relevant or at least less offensive.

My friends posted complaints on my page concerning my "liking" of said ads since they hated Facebook using my name as a reference.

But main thing is, if FB is so great, why do they have same scam-ish/opportunist ads that Yahoo has?

(refreshing, I get the same sort of thing - one targeted to my geographical location - mass market products, FB stuff, NOTHING SPECIFIC TO WHAT I WANT).

FB, a billion dollar company that still has only "potential"...

I can see zero evidence of ads being targeted to me,

try changing your status to engaged...

Hah! I encountered the same majorly-mismatched... then got engaged -> married. When I left, I was still getting tons of "ENGAGMENT RING HEER"-level ads, despite being married.

I've actually never seen an ad, and I have a pretty complete profile online. I didn't even know they put ads on the user pages until a few weeks ago when I saw them on somebody else's.

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