Facebook ad rating system: the social ad?

08.25.08 | Comment?

Facebook is having problems monetizing his website. He he. No surprises in my head, seems like the world works yet. But, in spite of their problem I think we might look at what they will do from this point, something new and different is cooking up.

The full story: Facebook started earlier this year to put ads on every page their platform has. They expected some good results, but they didn’t come. Nearly 90% of Facebook users never clicked on one of their ads. Now, they are implementing a small but meaningful change to the ad platform: they are expecting you to vote if the ad is relevant or not, putting a vote plugin below them with one finger up and one down. If you click on them (try it, please) you will get an ugly popup asking for feedback.

I heard in some place the objective is find better places to put ads, but, I had something a little different in my mind … what if this is a strategy to give you a sense of power over the ad, inciting you to participate and, in any case, click on the ad to see if it’s relevant or not? Holy cow! Could be possible? They are cheating us? I don’t think so: it’s only a strategy to pump up revenue and if they charge more over publishers with low rate ads, you really have power. In any case, you can “resist” clicking on them.

As internet industry people knows, each website has a different ad clicking rate and places where people see the ads more frequently. If you take income per webpage viewed as a comparison ratio, social networks, as forums, aren’t the best performing ad based revenue sites. In such kind of websites, what works best is word of mouth based viral strategies. Every people on those sites expect all to be social, have power, collaborate, give opinions… The strategy Facebook is doing now is his approach to find an answer to the question “how to make social ads?” Do you think they found the answer? I don’t know, let time goes on and see later; you bet I’ll have an eye on that.

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