With A Flick Of The Wrist, Facebook Could Destroy Current Advertising Models

Advertising is something that we’ve all grown accustomed to in today’s society. For companies that provide free services, it’s an important part of keeping those services free for everyone to use. But are ads even working on us anymore? That’s up for debate and discussion, and those are decisions everyone can make for themselves. One of the biggest companies ever facing the conundrum of introducing advertising is Facebook. The social network is inherently made up of people, and in turn, their content. There’s private content, personal content and public content. Facebook is trying to monetize as much of it as it can, to keep its shareholders happy, the service free and its users at bay from leaving for another option, of which there is none to speak of at the moment. No matter where the advertising is placed, it’ll either rub people the wrong way, or will be ignored completely. Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has been quoted as saying regarding ads: Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that. Is that “new” advertising the future, or is it more of the same? Remember those flashing, animated banner ads on websites in the early 2000′s? They were annoying and people didn’t really click on them. Just ask MySpace. Sure, they got some clicks, but only because advertisers became sneaky enough to turn them into “games” and interactive modules using Flash. They still sucked though. Where Myspace failed, Facebook has a real opportunity to capitalize on the fact that ads are just not so good for the user’s experience. How, you ask? By offering up an option to turn them off, something that has worked for services like Amazon’s Kindle, Pandora and Spotify recently. Yes, they are different, because they are offering up entertaining content. However, I would suggest that Facebook content is entertainment, especially since a lot of people spend a lot of their free, and busy, time on it. On mobile devices, there is way less real estate for unwanted content. Good thing that Facebook stopped working on them for a while. Making Something You’re Proud

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