Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Bans AdSense In Apps
An anonymous reader writes "Three days ago Facebook finalized their list of accepted ad networks for use within Facebook Apps; AdSense being an (unsurprising?) omission from the list, stating that any missing ad network had yet to agree to the Facebook TOS. Facebook developers were quick to point out the only losers in this cold-war between Facebook and Google are the developers themselves. Other devs go on to clarify that the reputations of some of the accepted networks is shady at best, leaving developers with sub-par options to monetize their work on the Facebook platform."
I love how Facebook can't do anything right as far as Slashdot is concerned. If they block ad networks, their evil...if they don't their also evil. Come on people!
Yes there is a definite pro-Facebook bias around here. Otherwise there'd never be so many Facebook stories.
Bear in mind that the very worst thing you can do to a company like Facebook is to ignore them.
To see their name in news headlines on so many sites tells them that they are important, that people are waiting with bated breath to see what they will do next, that people think it's worth talking about. It's what helps keep their brand in mind and ultimately helps to drive traffic to their site.
If Google is willing to partner with Facebook for advertising and Facebook thinks having a pissing contest is more important, then to any would-be Facebook developers: doesn't that tell you what their priorities are? Their priorities certainly don't include you. If you have skill and talent and a good work ethic, why not go someplace where your efforts are better appreciated?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The TOS "advertising providers" have to comply with are very very strict. I doubt Google will agree to things like these:
That's rather draconian, I'm not sure why any ad company would agree to those terms. It's a bit unreasonable for Facebook to demand the names and contact info of everyone involved in "designing, targeting, serving advertising related products/services". Does this mean that the companies who have agreed will have to fork over the contact info for every ad buyer that provides pre-designed ads? (In other words, nearly all ad buyers.) Sure sounds like it.
Frankly this sounds like an attempt by Facebook to get the names of employees to headhunt for an eventual Facebook-owned Ad network, as well as making sure they have plenty of contacts at the companies who buy ads as well. This is seriously abusive, even by Facebook's normal behavior. I suspect any ad companies who have agreed to this already are going to seriously regret it in the future.
Now as to me personally, I don't give a damn what they do here, I'm going to continue to adblock on Facebook because all the ads Facebook themselves run are obnoxious and annoying.
A couple of months back I spent a few weeks looking at developing a Facebook App. By the time I was done coding a simple one, I'd basically come to the conclusion that there were a lot better things to do with my time. Here's why:
* The APIs and SDKs. There's a lot of them. And not in the lots-to-love sense. In the dissociative identity disorder sense. Some of them work as specified. Some of them don't.
* The documentation. It sucks. It sucks extra because of the changes to the APIs -- a lot of times, you don't know if any given howto, forum post, internet article, and (in some cases) actual official documentation refers to the version of the API or SDK you're using. It sucks *particularly* hard because some complete moron at Facebook made the decision to blow away a community-built wiki site and replace it with a Bing search of the half-hearted official docs. And a lot of the links still out there still point to it.
* The policy/UI changes. Profile boxes (rather successful interaction hooks) were phased out in favor of tabs, which were going to be The New And Better Way. Now tabs are going away -- why? Oh, because it turned out that people didn't actually use them and Facebook now has another idea of what to do.
And this is from a company that's certainly sitting on the actual resources to do a hell of a lot better than this.
Watching all this, I developed two theories about Facebook:
1) It's possible that its success is more or less an accident of history -- they put something good enough together at the right time to become the premiere social network, and because of the network effect, it's sticky enough people don't simply defect despite its problems. But as an organization, they're not genuinely smart enough to do much further effectively... including providing a good platform for third-party devs.
2) Facebook doesn't really actually care about providing an effective and reliable platform for developers. They don't have to. There's enough incentive for would-be devs to try something and see if it works out that they can let the mass of attempts hit the wall and fail, and still reap benefits from those who break through and make things work. In the meanwhile, they can pretty much shift agendas as they see fit, and if that breaks a number of developer eggs, oh well. More will come.
I'm not sure which one is more true. My money is on #2, really, but there's possibly some measure of #1 as well. Either way, though, the upshot is that it's more or less an abusive platform, and the announcement that they're forbidding AdSense doesn't surprise me in the least -- it's totally consistent with both theories.
If you've got an idea that needs to feed from the fabric of the social web in order to succeed, then it's still the place to go. But if you've got another idea that doesn't, it might be better to go with that than to work with these guys.
Tweet, tweet.
As a facebook user, I get mad pussy.
As a facebook developer, I get mad money.
Do the math.
0 + 0 = 0