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This is a weakness of ad-supported business models. When users are buying or subscribing to a product, you want them to love it as much as possible so that they

by jfoster 13y ago

This is a weakness of ad-supported business models. When users are buying or subscribing to a product, you want them to love it as much as possible so that they will always buy more. Ad-supported models untie the relationship between UX and revenue. In an ad-supported model, you do need users to like the product enough to keep coming back, but small decreases in utility that generate more impressions could be great for revenue. The people at Facebook are extremely talented. It's a shame they're stuck with this business model. It would be awesome to see how good they could make Facebook if this wasn't tying them down.

babesh 13y ago
Isn't that what the Instagram, Whatsapp, and Occulus purchases are for? None of them are yet tied down to an advertising based business model.
- jfoster 13y ago
  Potentially they can even untie the Facebook product from the ad model. They could introduce "Facebook Premium" whereby you would pay a small monthly fee and have a different interface due to the space freed up from deciding to not show you ads.
jcampbell1 13y ago
I agree, this is primarily a consequence of being ad-supported. The same problem happens at Google, it is just less noticeable. Google is in the fortunate position of getting to do the best things for users for 99.5% of searches, it is the other .5% that they compromise on. At times, they have tried to do the best thing for customers on searches like "best morgage refinance rate", but in the end, they cancel the experiments because it would crush their revenues, and all the other good they are doing: http://www.seroundtable.com/mortgages-google-advisor-14813.html http://www.seroundtable.com/mortgages-google-advisor-14813.h... Google advisor was an amazing product that super beneficial to Google users, but the problem was it displaced $20/click ads.

by jfoster 13y ago

babesh 13y ago

Isn't that what the Instagram, Whatsapp, and Occulus purchases are for? None of them are yet tied down to an advertising based business model.

jfoster 13y ago
Potentially they can even untie the Facebook product from the ad model. They could introduce "Facebook Premium" whereby you would pay a small monthly fee and have a different interface due to the space freed up from deciding to not show you ads.

jcampbell1 13y ago

I agree, this is primarily a consequence of being ad-supported. The same problem happens at Google, it is just less noticeable. Google is in the fortunate position of getting to do the best things for users for 99.5% of searches, it is the other .5% that they compromise on. At times, they have tried to do the best thing for customers on searches like "best morgage refinance rate", but in the end, they cancel the experiments because it would crush their revenues, and all the other good they are doing: http://www.seroundtable.com/mortgages-google-advisor-14813.html http://www.seroundtable.com/mortgages-google-advisor-14813.h... Google advisor was an amazing product that super beneficial to Google users, but the problem was it displaced $20/click ads.