Facebook and Advertising

I, as a dedicated FB user, have almost connected to everybody I know from my high school, college and beyond. I stalk my favorite crushes and that’s it for me. In fact, I get worried when any of my relatives joins FB. And now I have also lost drive to comment on every single comment posted by one of my numerous “friends”. And also I cannot come up with clever and funny status messages to find out how many of my friends are alive enough to look out if I’m alive.

I don’t play Mafia Wars, Farmville or anything on Zynga. Well, actually, I was a Zynga Poker regular for maybe 3 months. Then I grew out of it. Never paid real dollars. I don’t click on all those rectangles on the side offering me avenues to talk to beautiful single girls or make friends or another MBA degree. To sum it up I am not being useful for advertisers.

So where is the value for advertisers? Are they getting enough pageviews and clicks that can justify the $50B valuation for FB? Or are they doing it because competitor next door is doing it? Every company has to have a page on FB and when you “like” it you start getting updates, deals and what not. So the page where you wanted to stalk your crushes or follow your friends might become a pile of all these corporations trying to get that sweet dollar out of your pocket (actually the credit card). I am sure a lot of the users don’t want anything to do with advertisements. So it seems to me that the advertisers are spending their energy to capture the users which are not interested.

What if the advertisers could advertise at an avenue where almost all of the audience want to see advertisements by brands, products etc.? A place where the users can view ads for all the new smartphones, cars or whatever they like. They can rate them and help other users. They can be directly led to shopping page from there with possible discounts.

Value of this portal – Users are serious and interested. Either they want to catch what’s new or they are potential buyers. Advertisers get traffic that is really at that online community because they want to. Think of forums where passionate people exchange ideas ad contribute. My guess is this will result in higher conversion rate. This could be also a tool to get feedback on their advertisements.

I am not sure how to monetize it and even if it will work or not. I am not an expert on advertising practices and have not been in touch with enough inside people to come up with something concrete. But that’s the initial idea. I find solace in the fact that my country has enough coders to put up a working model (if this makes sense!!).

Irony: I did share this on FB

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