Facebook has decided to keep its platform clean from advertisements ran by its users in a proposed update to the Statements of Rights and Responsibilities Site Governance.
2. You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).
Facebook users have time to leave feedback on the proposed changes until 18th August 10.00PDT.
This is a bold move in a fight against the the Pay Per model, better known from Izea (Formerly PayPerPost), who recently launched Sponsored Tweets.
At the same time Facebook announced that they can block the right to publish page updates to the newsfeed, killing the concept of generic pages.
When you publish content or information to your Page we have no obligation to distribute your content or information to users.
When the Facebook redesign was launched one of the main features was the new power which was given to pages and it should have come as no surprise that companies but also marketers would play with these. I have found the new pages to be a great social tool and potentially a vertical business. It did not take long before new companies such as Status Plug launched and offered sponsored status updates for page owners. Status Plug which listed several page with more than 1m fans at premium rates, such as Laughing when someone fails (minimum offer $390), pulled the plug today after the new policy for pages.
Although I can understand that Facebook doesn’t want users to earn money from the platform I think they are missing out on a major stream of income here, just like Twitter does. With the size of both platforms each could easily set up their own ads market place and cash in all while making the users happy. The argument here is simple: it are the users who contribute to the popularity of the platform and certainly deserve some credit. No one else can better implement and control a maintained disclosure policy than the platform development team.
For Facebook at the same time it would be a great opportunity to show that they know how to implement advertising, while using the users name, without creating havoc, because I for one am still waiting for the first pundit to shout: ‘Facebook, DO evil’ as new motto for the Palo Alto company.
Of course you can always become a fan of Google Adsense on Facebook.
