The Zohar Class

According to FOXNews.com, Facebook has unveiled plans to target advertisements by injecting them into its members’ conversations.

Facebook is giving users some control over whether to share information on their buying habits and other online activities with friends.

For the program announced Tuesday to work, enough users must actually say “yes” so advertisers can show users their pitches in the guise of friends’ endorsements.

It seems that Facebook is trying to make money out of its sudden success, but not exactly know how. It feels that its creators are shooting to all the directions, without success…

To tell the truth, web-advertising is a just another form of spam. If my Firefox plugin would have been only slightly better, I wouldn’t have any adverts on at all when browsing. Its a great spam filter.

But like with spam mails, I learned to ignore the adverts, and just mark them as spam, without even readin the content. I hardly ever go to advertised links, and it only happens by mistake, or because Google placed them in a strategic location at the top of my search results.

The major problem with spamdvertising is when heavy, loud, video adverts are appearing on certain news sites, jamming my bandwidth and crashing my browser. But I’m not sure that Google Adwords are doing any better.

I think web based companies should find other ways to make money than spam their users with advertising. Of course they might make good money of adverts, but the users don’t appreciate it a s good-will gesture, will not press on the proposed link (or doing it unknowingly), and will not remember the name of the brand. Slowly, we will just learn to ignore it.

Companies need to find a better way to advertise their products (examples 1 and 2). An simple ideas is that a marketing person will post the link on his (Facebook) page and will share it with his friends. If its good, his friends will share it with their friends and so on. This is lovable unspammed advertising (unless if its done excessively)

But how will the site (Facebook) will generate money of it?

Maybe the advertised company should donate money to the site after a succesful campaign? Maybe the site should create a pro version for their site (works for Flickr)? And maybe the site should sell T shirts and other products…

I know its difficult to generate money online, but can you please move on from web spamdverising and leave our reading space alone?