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Comment by sixQuarks | Hacker News Reader

forget about your personal preferences for a second and think about this from a marketing perspective. This could be huge for Facebook.

Marketers dream for this type of targeting. Now, instead of an ad that people ignore, you could get a message delivered directly to these people. I, for one, would gladly pay $1 per targeted delivery of message.

If the system works as elegantly as Google Adwords, this will be big. It could go either way though. 1) users revolt against this and it flops, or 2) users actually like the messages from high bidders because it targets them especially well.

Will be exciting to see which way it turns out

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There was a problem last year when the "other" folder was implemented, you'd get important messages that were completely missed (many people I know missed things that genuinely mattered) and Facebook needs a way to get around this problem. A small arbitrary fee is a perfect solution.

If Facebook wanted to allow marketers to message users directly why wouldn't they build a system for it? I can't see how this is an attempt to make revenue... it would be an awful decision. How would a marketer even know who to target?

what do you mean how would a marketer know who to target? Facebook is the wet-dream of marketers. They have so much info on everyone - what are your likes, what school did you go to, when you got engaged, married, divorced, etc.

I might be misunderstanding how Facebook advertising works, so correct me if I'm wrong, but from my work with it I understand it to work as follows:

I (a Facebook user) have likes, I have interactions with things (pages, people, websites) and I have personal information (age, gender). An advertiser can target these things (eg: 21 year old male) but they cannot say "Give me the profile URLs of every that likes Minecraft" can they?

For example I currently have this advert displaying on Facebook: http://i.imgur.com/3p9oy.png, Thinkgeek don't know who I am, only Facebook does. Thinkgeek provide the targeting information, Facebook execute it.

If this is the case, how would a company like Thinkgeek ever know to message me about Minecraft things? unless Facebook provided them with my profile, which they do not. The only way to do it would be if they were scraping profiles, which Facebook do not allow and if Facebook were to allow it they would build out such a system (targeted messages).

They can target everything.

Country,City,Age,Sex,Relationship Status,Language,Education,Workplace,Platform and finally interest based.

Interest based can be as specific as "Liking" a minecraft page or as broad as gaming. They can target you for using a specific app on facebook or playing a specific game.

They can target every single thing about you.

Edit: It's late.

I've re-read your comment.

It would probably not be a direct message from Thinkgeek , but more like a marketing email with whatever content they provided to facebook.

It would feel weird to receive a direct message from a company and might look sketchy.

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