The Facebook Fallacy

For all its valuation, the social network is just another ad-supported site. Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse and take down the Web.

Facebook not only is on course to go bust but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it. 

Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, this assertion will sound exaggerated. But that doesn't mean it isn't true. 

At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 900 million users, its valuation of around $60 billion (as of early June), and a business derived primarily from fairly traditional online advertising, is now at the heart of the heart of this fallacy.

The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. The nature of people's behavior on the Web and of how they interact with advertising, as well as the character of those ads themselves and their inability to command attention, has meant a marked decline in advertising's impact.  

At the same time, network technology allows advertisers to more precisely locate and assemble audiences outside of branded channels. Instead of having to go to CNN for your audience, a generic CNN-like audience can be assembled outside CNN's walls and without the CNN-brand markup. This has resulted in the now famous and cruelly accurate formulation that $10 of offline advertising becomes $1 online. 

I don't know anyone in the ad-­supported Web business who isn't engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn't manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.  Continue at Michael Wolff

The Psychology of Social Networking (infographic)

Neal Postman warned that we were Amusing Ourselves to Death. Maybe today the fear is that we publicize ourselves to death. That’s the concern represented on this infographic.

Just consider some of these statistics:

• 9 out of 10 internet users are on a social network
• Every minute we produce 694,980 status updates
• 80% of social media posts are about the poster

But the best stat of all: “9 out of 10 Americans think people share too much.” Stop and think about that for a minute. 9 out of 10 of us are doing it. And we’re doing it a lot. But we think everyone else should be doing it less. That makes sense.

And why do we do it? To serve the greater good, advance public discourse, or develop larger networks of meaningful relationships? The infographic suggests a different reason: “Talking about ourselves activates the regions of the brain associated with the sense of satisfaction from food, money, or sex.”

Um.

Here’s the infographic. Check it out for yourself HERE.

Are We Too Obsessed With Facebook? [INFOGRAPHIC] Jolie O'Dell

Facebook profiles are like belly buttons: Everybody’s got one.

Perhaps that statement’s still a bit of an exaggeration, but by the numbers, we (that is, Internet users around the globe) are becoming more obsessed with Facebook by the day. 

One out of every 13 Earthlings and three out of four Americans is on Facebook, and one out of 26 signs into Facebook on a daily basis.

We could rattle off stats like that until the cows come home, but instead, we’d like to show you this fascinating infographic from SocialHype and OnlineSchools.org.

Here, in a visual nutshell, are some highlights about Facebook usage, 2010 trends, adoption numbers and a great deal more.

Take a good look at this information (or click here for the full-size version), and in the comments, let us know what you think about our global fascination with Facebook. Is Facebook an amazing connective medium? A plague that preys on the easily addicted? A little bit of both, or something else entirely?

Via: Online Schools

HT: Tim Challies

Teens Want More Than Pizza