[treyfitty]

I believe this is step 1 in entering/dominating another industry: influencer marketing. Hear me out. I have 3 friends who have started “influencer marketing” companies that fly out 20 or so influencers, and brands pay for posts during their trip. I’m not too well attuned to the economics of it, but from what I can see, it’s profitable.

Facebooks move of doing this is probably to ultimately purposefully change the incentives for advertisers. Now, advertisers, who have went all in to social networks will have to retain that channel, since it happens to work so well. And they’ll be paying more per ad, as a result of the economics of this new marketing paradigm. Influencers (when FB takes over this market, I’m sure they/we won’t be called that) and Facebook is, please excuse my use of a buzzword, a true synergy. I mean, who wouldn’t want free stuff* (with the catch that you have to post about the product x times in a given time frame)? By using the whole network as a conduit for advertising, I think this is going to be huge.

[dude01]

I think you're right, influencers are going to get bigger. They're kind of like a contracted-out or part-time sales team. Or another way of looking at it, they're living commercials.

Eventually FB will see influences as a challenge to their own ad network (the only ads on FB must go thru FB!), so I agree with you, FB will try to take it over. PS I wonder why you got a downvote.