[Avshalom]

Right I mean, driving a click through to a website due to rage has to be less profitable than driving a click through to say DeWalt power tools due to delight. Right? I mean some fraction of a fraction of of an ad for DeWalt must be worth less than keeping your friends pro DeWalt status update on top.

(This is not a paid ad for DeWalt but seriously, fucking DeWalt. Them and Stihl: just gorgeous power tools)

[matwood]

Haha. Yeah. My wife doesn't get it yet that when I pay a little extra for DeWalt it means I will not have to buy the same tool again for a very long time.

[jugg1es]

I wholeheartedly agree with this statement.

[adventured]

No question. The value of sales engines - driving sales referrals - as ecommerce in the US doubles over the next ~10 years (and in many developed economies), is extraordinary. If you want to make a billion dollars, build the next generation of sale referral monsters (RetailMeNot or Coupons.com being a primitive, unsophisticated first generation version; Groupon & Co were/are also primitive early sales referral engines).

A catalog is a concept, rather than a pile of printed paper as perhaps most people would think of it (ie thinking that catalogs died out with the rise of the Web). Historically catalogs pushed sales in all sorts of ways for all sorts of things, for eg the last 150 years in the US (and much longer elsewhere). As a concept, it's a sales referral system; it can either be internally owned (Sears Catalog) to drive content within eg a retailer's selection, or it can drive sales for external stray objects (whether tchotchkes or otherwise). The catalog business in the US was massive for a century. It's being rebuilt online right now. Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. are in part sales referral engines, there will be dozens of major platforms that perform that role, as it spreads to fill in every possible ecommerce niche.

All of these shops/brands/products coming online or being started from day one online, need a way to drive sales online (the more cost effectively the better). Taking a cut of that sales referral action will be dramatically more valuable than rage clicks for content on a random buzzfeed article or a paid click over to low value content on boredpanda and similar.

[hickeygareth]

Are your thoughts that Facebook et al would - instead of charging for an ad 'impression' - charge ecommerce sites a sales commission for the referral? (Disclaimer; I think/imagine they do this already to some extent, but it's not the main revenue driver.)

If this were the case, then it would absolutely be in Facebook's interest to present ads based on a persons likelihood of purchase (perhaps using a deep neural recommendations network (akin to YouTube's) to power it all).