[vmarsy]

>I think that this stunt will increase Facebook's profits in the short term, mainly because of businesses that have already invested in building their pages. Longer term, however, we'll definitely see a shift to direct email marketing.

That's right, nothing prevents current small businesses to post a last one paid facebook post telling the followers : "Subscribe to our mailing list here to get the exclusive offers"

But the key problems could be :

1 - People prefer browsing on Facebook than on their email client

2 - As a small business owner, creating posts on Facebook is easy, whereas creating nice emails that looks good isn't as easy. Getting feedback on these offers (Facebook Likes+Comments vs. nothing) is also a main problem for email marketing