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Mark Cuban: Facebook Is Driving Away Brands — Starting With Mine
concealment sends this quote from an article at ReadWriteWeb:
"Tech billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says he is fed up with Facebook and will take his business elsewhere. He's sick of getting hit with huge fees to send messages to his team's fans and followers. Two weeks ago Cuban tweeted out a screen grab of an offer he'd received from Facebook. The social network wanted to charge him $3,000 to reach 1 million people. Along with the screen grab, Cuban wrote, 'FB is blowing it? This is the first step. The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or to new MySpace as primary site.'"
Seriously, MySpace?!
Facebook constantly tinkers with EdgeRank to make it more effective, says product manager Will Cathcart. The algorithm change in September was a bigger change than usual, Cathcart says, but its goal was simply to cut down on spam in people's news feed.
FB: "Unless you pay for delivery, we'll be fighting your spam".
End result:
* the "network socialite" doesn't actually "socialize" anymore - it's advertising
* the others will still be served spam
Must be that FB is really desperate for revenue.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
.3 cents per person is really pretty cheap. Somehow telemarketers stay in business, and they're paying someone $8/hr to make what 20 calls an hour? If it's not worth .3 cents per person to contact them, you probably have no actual business contacting them at all.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This is precisely a bait and switch. You promise a free service, refuse to offer the free service and then demand money for the exact same functionality that was promised for free.
Combine this with recent accusations that Facebook's feeds have been broken on purpose as of late to necessitate promoting posts, and accusations of click-fraud eating up paid advertising and you have to wonder if Facebook is beginning to shoot themselves in the foot. They have tons of users, but they don't seem to know how to monetize that well.
http://memeburn.com/2012/11/is-facebook-really-broken-on-purpose/
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-accused-of-click-fraud-by-advertiser-2012-7
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
.3 cents per person is really pretty cheap.
Is it? If you read the actual article, Cuban's complaints seem to be that there are extra costs not included in that figure. Part of his problem is that they had to advertise for Facebook to drive people to their Facebook page in the first place. So there's already money invested which should be taken into consideration as part of the "cost per person."
He also points out that since it's variable and on a per-post basis, it's basically impossible for them to plan ahead - they can't say "OK, we're dedicating $100,000 this year to our Facebook budget" and then choose when and what to post based on that, as the price per post can change. He also seems to suggest that this actually increases the costs, as it adds a new layer of accounting for every post.
I find that second argument to be the most persuasive. If the cost per post really does change and budgeting really is impossible, then yes, that's definitely a problem and one that Facebook should fix. He seems to be OK with the idea of paying Facebook, but he wants the costs to be known ahead of time and paid up front, rather than on a per-post basis.
Cuban also appears to be betting that, since they have to advertise to get people to the Facebook page in the first place, he can advertise their Twitter feed and get people to follow that, instead. That way their upfront costs would remain the same, but they wouldn't have extra unexpected and unknowable costs in the future. I'm not sure I entirely believe this, but if he's right and it's their advertising that's driving people to their Facebook page and not Facebook as a platform itself, then why should he pay Facebook extra for the privilege of needing to advertise for them in the first place?
Of course, I suppose we'll only find out if he's right in a year or two, after he tries out moving to other platforms. I'm not so sure he is, but then again, I never "liked" any businesses on Facebook in the first place.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.