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by snowwrestler
5136 days ago
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Google is a tool and Facebook is entertainment. If you look at the history of advertising, entertainment companies have done far better than tool companies. Who made more money in the 20th century--the magazine publishing industry or the Yellow Pages? Think of Facebook like a magazine. When people read through National Geographic, are they looking to buy a camera right then? No. And yet all the camera companies advertize heavily in Nat Geo because having their ad next those photos creates a positive brand association. Facebook is developing the ability to show ads that are contextual to whatever you're reading or talking about on Facebook. Their success won't be measured in clicks, but in the same way companies have valued brand ads for decades--by statistical research. |
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You appear to be referring to future success. It's like Microsoft talking up "vaporware". It gets people's attention, maybe it convinces some to believe and some to invest, but it offers them nothing. Only a promise of some future of which no one can be certain.
We have almost two decades of web display ads and their effects on building brands. Advertisers are not too impressed. They have waited patiently for something that compares to a magazine ad. And no one has delivered. Maybe solving the context problem might not be so easy. Maybe a website is not a magazine.
Meanwhile people are looking for products and services via the web, with their credit cards in hand. And Google has been there to help advertisers reach them.
That's not some promise of the future, that's the here and now.
Facebook has real power for influence. And some of that can no doubt benefit corporations. But what Google offers is something much more direct and efficient. And it's not a pie-in-the-sky promise, it's proven to have worked year after year.
Facebook has no business model. They only have everyone's curiousity. And that's mainly because the "content" on FB is everyone's friends and family, not the type of packaged, commercialised "entertainment" you get from a magazine. FB is not a magazine. It's a photo-album. More specifically, it's a collection of personal photo albums.
It does have some added "features" to the traditional photo album. It comes with tacky, invasively personal display ads in the margin. And it comes with a team of "engineers" looking over your shoulder to log every photo you look at and every comment you make. And it's exposed to viewing by millions of strangers (this is totally unnecessary). I think we can have photo albums without all that cruft. And I think we will.