Anyway, what’s so cool about not making money? Well, it was a couple of years after Google won our hearts and mindshare with clean design and being good at their core proposition before they discovered how to make money without making us uncomfortable.
Facebook has been true to similar principles for the past couple of years. The big question: Will the big-guy-karma-king provide for FB who have stepped forward into the unknown in faith and hope. I don’t know. But it makes compelling viewing.
That’s the end of this post really. Unless you are a nerd. That is as opposed to a geek. Y’know geeks being kinda cool, nice guys/gals who find themselves cringing at the kind of stuff that excites us nerds. You have been warned.
I find its always makes an interesting study in comparison of style when Mashable and Valleywag report simulataneously on the same story. Nerd squared. That’s me. As opposed to Geek squared. What can I say. So for your delectation and without further commentary. I present the following posts from Valleywag and Mashable in the raw.
Valleywag:
Today, I don’t think Randi Jayne, director of market development at Facebook and sister of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, would sing quite so gleefully about “startups [that] get the rag … from Valleywag.” Because now comes her employer’s turn. The Reach Students blog notes that a campaign on Facebook drew a 0.04% click-through rate — a dismal response that’s far from uncommon in advertisers’ experiences. No wonder the site is scraping the bottom of the barrel to find advertisers. If Zuckerberg is to maintain his site’s precious independence, he will have to figure out better ways for his company — and its advertisers — to profit from its rapidly swelling user base. Should he consider placing ads on his sister’s show tunes instead? They’d get better click-throughs.
Mashable:
Facebook is known for its minimalist design, and any ads within the site are largely unobtrusive. There are ads on Facebook, though, in the form of banners and flyers. One company, Reach Students, has found that the clickthrough rate for flyer ads is less than desirable.
After toying around with its ads, Reach Students found that the clickthrough rate was only about 0.04%, with 1.4 million page impressions. Turns out, this low clickthrough rate has been the case for nearly every company that advertises on Facebook with both banners and flyers. A precise reason for the low clickthrough rate has yet to be determined, though some say its the ‘messaging’ nature of Facebook, drawing users in for a reason other than the site’s content, but this point is very arguable. It’s also important to note that much of the data on Facebook ads and their resulting clickthrough rate is anecdotal, though some studies have been done.
With the release of one ad network for Facebook apps and another one soon to be launched, perhaps we’ll see some culmination of ads within a certain level of Facebook communication. Or we’ll see the same reaction from users towards a Facebook apps advertising network, leaving much to be desired.
