Plague of advertisers to descend on facebook
By Luke McKinney
Venture capitalists are setting up funds specifically to ruin Facebook, by feeding the tidal wave of the annoying extra applications that crop up in your notifications every morning.
The New York Times reports that investors are attracted by Facebook’s soaring popularity and plan to access the rich advertising market contained therein. These businesses are apparently unaware that such advertisements could have the same effect as oil drilling in a wildlife reserve.
Many users were attracted to Facebook because MySpace had become a media-driven monstrosity filled to the gills with adverts, fake accounts, and horrible embedded media clips that you have to pause every time you load a page. Facebook’s clean interface allowed them to network without the rubbish. Until now. It’s not uncommon to log in and find forty invitations to be a Ninja, Zombie, Pirate, Pirate vs Ninja, Cyborg Vampire and a million other things that might have been funny the first time.
While making money based on people’s desire to waste time seems a guaranteed success, none of the facebook application plague have actually managed it in a sustainable way. Most of the advertising revenue earned so far comes from applications pushing other applications, which in turn push other applications. You might recognize this "multiplying without bringing in external benefits" as how diseases grow in your body, and with the same effect.
Facebook itself is reportedly developing a new system which will allow adverts in more locations, not restricted to an applications home page.
A major problem is the difference in attitude. Investors and businesspeople talk about online advertising like a magical pot of gold, a wonderful way to harvest money from the vast untapped fields of the internet. Internet users view advertising like the flu - unpleasant, makes things less enjoyable but there doesn’t seem to be any way to get rid of it.
Certainly something has to pay for the servers, but the investor-friendly idea that "more advertising is better!" is like pouring a kilo of salt over your dinner to make it tastier: it doesn’t work, you didn’t understand, and now it’s ruined.
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