It's not that hard to monetize: just stick ads on pages and sell them. If they had been happy with a billion-dollar valuation, they could simply do that, and ev

It's not that hard to monetize: just stick ads on pages and sell them. If they had been happy with a billion-dollar valuation, they could simply do that, and everybody would have been happy, including their blissfully unzombified users. Unfortunately, they're not happy being a billion-dollar company, they want to be a 15-billion dollar company, or perhaps a hundred-billion-dollar company. To justify that kind of size they need to think up all sorts of new ways to monetize their users (e.g. Beacon) at the possible cost of annoying their users (e.g. Beacon).