Facebook Turns Friend Activity Into New Ad Format | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Turns Friend Activity Into New Ad Format

mashable.com

41 pointshornokplease25 comments

Remember when people were paid to appear in a corporation's ads?

Yeah, this is a nice twist - Facebook makes money, Starbucks makes money, and the people providing the content and authority get nothing.

Well, the "people providing the content and authority" get Facebook for free... including for all the years before this was unveiled.

Considering that Facebook has multi-billion dollar valuation, makes money selling users advertising, and makes money selling analyses of user information, my view is that the users are kindly donating Facebook their information, not that Facebook is kindly donating their service. While users may benefit personally from the service being available, Facebook are the ones benefiting financially.

Users do not give Facebook money directly, but they contribute something valuable to the company just by using the site. I see it as a business relationship the same as if I was paying money for the service.

Neither side is 'kindly donating' their portion. Both are getting back more than they give, in a voluntary mutually-beneficial transaction. Or they'd each do something else instead.

I agree, I mainly state it like that as a foil to the commonly heard idea that these sites are giving us something for free. They're not; they're giving us a service in exchange for what we give to them.

Now and then I see someone complain about a free service, Google for instance, and receive a response such as "Well you're entitled to all your money back". This is stated as if the customer has no right to complain, because the service is 'free'. As you noted, that it is not the case. It's more of a symbiotic relationship.

Thought Facebook is clearly free to do as they wish, I personally feel that using my messages to friends to promote products for Facebook's profit is something other than what I expected when I signed up.

homo-economicus is an absurd simplification.

Somehow I knew this was coming and had a similar idea for a startup, except I'd make these ads more transactional oriented and give users who triggered the ad a cut, since after all they are promoting a product/service. And I'd limit it to n ads per user per week, otherwise you can get spammy behavior out of "friends" trying to maximize their credits--sound familiar?

Anyway, we'll see how that works out. I would honestly demand money if a brand tried to associate myself with them even if it makes sense. It's time to track and rewad word-of-mouth ads--consider them this now. It's clear Facebook and others are in a position to do this. You know that $50 billion+ valuation? Doesn't sound as crazy now, does it?

update: Reading some comments on mashable, I see a good counter to my point: why should FB pay you if they don't charge you to use their site? Fair enough, but at some point users deserve to be rewarded by brands/companies (not facebook) for their loyalty and for attracting them new customers.

Using the example from the article. This could go very wrong. I imagine something along those lines:

"Puking after drinking bad coffee - at Starbucks with my friend.

STARBUCKS!"

I'm guessing they can analyze the sentiment of the statement, and opt out when it's negative.

I certainly cannot foresee 4chan gaming this NO SIREE.

Facebook bans you from doing this: "You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser)."

Must be nice to make the rules.

I don't understand what's to stop the system accidentally generating sponsored ads following negative interaction with a brand: you'd get John Smith says - Starbuck's sucks! - sponsored story!

I wonder if they filter that out using a mood interpreter, like the ones that have been applied to twitter messages?

What's nifty about the mechanism is that it doesn't, at least for now and according to the article, require the ever so difficult sentiment analysis. You have to explicitly "like" something or check in. Some users will have fun abusing this, but not so much more than some researchers abuse machine learning/nlp who complicate their living by putting too many constraints on a machine intelligence task. (Don't get me wrong, I love machine learning/nlp; it just doesn't have to be more complicated than it already is.)

"You have to explicitly "like" something or check in."

This only works if the "like" actions are filtered to company-approved material only. Otherwise you can "like" a post trashing the company.

Yep. I'm sure FB will be smart about it.

What's interesting is that companies were already creating incentives for people to like a page, check-in to a place, post to a wall ...

Now, not only do they have to create incentives for these actions to take place, they have to pay Facebook for the right for these actions to be displayed prominently.

It is like double taxation.

I seem to recall when Facebook (or was it Gmail?) was started, something like this was one of the proposals for producing revenue. There was quite an uproar over it because it meant that whoever it was would be going through all of your personal information and parsing it for different keywords. It was deemed 'too creepy' and toned down.

The times they are a changin'.

When I am I going to get paid to wear the labels on the outside of my clothes?

Never, as long as other people are willing to pay to do the same thing :)

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

also called "bid to increase your rank in the newsfeed"

I am not against this as long as the stories are marked as sponsored, and not part of the main results. After all that's what Google's adwords are, in a sense.

It looks like they are a part of the main news feed.

"sponsored stories" will appear in the right hand column along with ads and other things like "people you may know". your newsfeed will be the same as always and the ranking there is unaffected by which stories can be sponsored.

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