In the world of Advertising, Facebook is their guru; the New Network Monopoly
margaretliu on November 10th, 2007
Facebook rolls out highly targeted Viral Ad System
Facebook. The first word that should come to mind is “network monopoly”. The second word should be “Facebook Ads”, because essentially, that’s what makes Facebook a network monopoly. Forget tangible gifts that are actually worth something, gimme them Facebook gifts! Oh by the way, did I mention we can O’snap? True, Fergie is making a ridiculous fergilicious come back on Facebook. This new ad system was debuted just four days ago. According to the article, Facebook’s is an…
“ad system that allows businesses to track users’ activities on the web (and on Facebook) to deliver product referrals and targeted advertising. If you’ve ever wanted to use social networking to share extraneous information about your purchases and product endorsements, your time has come.”
I don’t know about you, but this new ad system creeps me out:
“At its core, Facebook Ads has three primary components (all of which launch tonight). The first is straight forward enough — businesses are now able to create Facebook profiles. Not much of a surprise here, but there’s a twist. Along with serving as a hub for the business’ brand, the profile can also serve as the spring board for viral apps (the second component). These can manifest themselves as anything from brand-stamped casual games, or even e-commerce apps that track purchases on partner websites.”
More specifically, the efficacy of non price competition (advertising) is wondrously creepy. Remember those “CONGRATUALTIONS YOU WON A MILLION DOLLARS” ads backing 1999? Yeah, whatever. We never clicked them. JETMAN however, is predicted to become one of the leading causes of arthritis and eyesight impairment. Not to mention shoulder stiffness and neck stiffness and possibly brain stiffness. The fact that someone found a way to make Facebookers believe adding an app is NOT the same as clicking one of those internet ads, is absolutely (and economically) genius. Speaking of Jetman, someone tell the creator Simeon Dorsey to unblock us jetman users. Simeon Dorsey, we want to poke you so bad!
November 14th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Wow this is creepy. I’m on Facebook (like always) and I just saw this post…
This article kind of ties in with the post that Alice posted a few weeks ago, stating how Facebook is becoming a large social network, especially with its collaboration with Microsoft. Especially now that it has added all these advertisements, Fb is becoming more powerful than ever. It’s ridiculous how many different application one can now add onto their account. In a sense, it’s like all the companies for these applications are under the branch of Facebook.
A lot of websites are going to try and compete with this (in the past there have been xanga and myspace but that kind of died with the emergence of Facebook). However, since Facebook is now so efficient and popular, other sites will have an extremely hard time trying to beat it. It can try incorporating a lot of advertisements in like Facebook, but that will not guarantee its success.
November 16th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
I think it’s great that people are creating the fourth phase of advertising (first are banners and follow by postings and search engines), but it is a bit creepy having people peek into your life and know that you blog on the wikinomics every NIGHT! My first thought when i read the post is that there’s gonna be some major privacy problem or even safety issues. I read a similar article on The Economist, and it said that 98% of MySpace users correctly report their addresses and immediately update important changes in life. If there is a way to access the sites you visited and a shirt that you bought, it is not difficult to track down your credit card number, address, background, etc.
Yet, with technology changing everyday, i guess such problem is only temporary. Oligopolists have a new advertising method!
November 18th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
WHAT!?!? My view of Jetman has been forever shattered. This whole time I thought I was just innocently playing a simple game to pass the time and try to get a high score, but LITTLE DID I KNOW Facebook was brainwashing me with ads… I agree that this really does show the emphasis that firms in monopolistic competition or oligopoly place on advertising/nonprice competition. And with the way that Facebook has so trickily incorporated ads into their networking system so that users don’t even realize they’re being subjected to advertising only shows how effective it is for firms to think of creative, new and innovative methods of advertising.
November 19th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
I don’t know if this is mentioned but Facebook effective uses the network effect in order to increase its economies of scale.
SUP