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I'm an advertiser and have been in buying online ads for about 6 years. I'm disappointed with Facebook. It's not directly about roi or fraud or anything like t

by netcan 14y ago

I'm an advertiser and have been in buying online ads for about 6 years. I'm disappointed with Facebook. It's not directly about roi or fraud or anything like that, not fundamentally (though obviously no one will advertise long term with a poor roi). It's more about vision. Adwords & Overture had some sort of vision about advertising online so do lots of (mostly unsuccessful upstarts). I really do think that with all of their problems they did a great job. Adwords is a great ad platform. It's more meritocratic. Scales down nicely for small/local businesses and is genuinely useful to the people seeing/clicking the ads. Facebook on the other hand seems content to ride the buzz of companies keen to figure out this new medium. They don't seem to be taking advantage of it to implement some solid idea. It seems like they have no interesting ideas about how their contribution to the communication-entertainment-advertising ecosystem looks. They don't really seem to understand themselves how/why/what their system (which is inevitably a new kind of advertising) is supposed to be working. The @facebook email address mess is a kind of analogy. Think you can improve on email/communication? Great. We need it. Think Facebook is a unique position to do so? Great. I agree (at least for some people). Figure out a way of doing it that people want. Don't trick people into something that feels like its for the company instead of the consumer.

dasil003 14y ago
It's because “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”
- wutbrodo 14y ago
  The problem there is that they don't seem to be intent on building better services either. It's been a while now that they've had incredible resources to work with: top-tier tech talent, a captive audience of unprecedented scale, etc. And (possibly excluding timeline), they've done absolutely nothing interesting with their product. The argument that they're bad at monetizing because they're focusing their energies on improving their product is a bit hard to swallow given that their product hasn't really improved (or at the very least, does so at a glacial pace).

by netcan 14y ago

dasil003 14y ago

It's because “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

wutbrodo 14y ago
The problem there is that they don't seem to be intent on building better services either. It's been a while now that they've had incredible resources to work with: top-tier tech talent, a captive audience of unprecedented scale, etc. And (possibly excluding timeline), they've done absolutely nothing interesting with their product. The argument that they're bad at monetizing because they're focusing their energies on improving their product is a bit hard to swallow given that their product hasn't really improved (or at the very least, does so at a glacial pace).