Facebook management is going in the complete wrong direction. They are trying to generate more revenue per user rather than trying to make the user happy. They are treating the advertisers like the customers. The users are the important customers. It is very short sighted.
The important customers are always the ones who pay the bills, in this case that'd be the advertisers, not the users. This should be obvious, without being able to pay the bills there is no service at all.
The important customers are always the ones who pay the bills, in this case that'd be the advertisers, not the users.
I think that is the fundamental point about Facebook's business model. The Facebook view is that the customers of Facebook are
a) advertisers,
b) third-party application developers,
and
c) whoever else has corporate-size bankrolls to fund Facebook.
Regular users are mere eyeballs to count to draw in the actual customers to Facebook. It has been an interesting free ride to be on Facebook, and I DO spend a lot of time there recently since I figured out how to use posted links to stimulate interesting conversations among my varied circles of friends who have never met one another. But I don't see how Facebook can be profitable in the genuine, investor-satisfying meaning of "profitable" without becoming very annoying to most users. Good luck to anyone who can succeed in providing Facebook-level service and making an honest day's wage, but so far the model is still not making sense.
What if they charged each user $1 per month? I would pay that if it means I don't have to worry about my communication, photos, etc. being resold to others.
That is not at all how management views it. They are not at all emphasizing revenue; they are engineering-driven, not business-driven, and their engineers are driving the company, not just the management.
