William Carleton, Counselor @ Law

As long as Facebook is building tools to let users control sponsored story endorsements, why not share the revenue?

Quick followup to yesterday's post about Facebook's proposal to build a tool that would give users control over their endorsements within sponsored stories (ads): why not share the ad revenue with the endorser?

Disqus seems to be going this way. In a blog post last week, Disqus announced that its revenue-sharing program, "Promoted Discovery," started kicking in October 1. (I've used the tool Disqus has rolled out to choose settings for Promoted Discovery, and it presents simple choices in a visual way.)

It could spawn a cottage industry. Really influential Facebook users (those with clout) might even make a living endorsing brands in sponsored stories! Rather than bemoan the time teenagers waste on Facebook, parents could applaud the initiative and industry.

Caveat: Facebook's proposal came in the context of advocating for court approval of a proposed settlement of a lawsuit brought by users aggreived at finding themselves used as endorsers within sponsored stories. The tool has not been built, and it's possible that it may not actually be in the company's plans unless and until the settlement, as so proposed, is approved by the court.

Photo: Barry Solow / Flickr.

Coming soon, to a phone near you

One of my tweeps has "ooo'd" and another has "ahhh'd" over the posted interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at TechCrunch Disrupt. So I watched it.

The theme of the interview was Facebook's mobile future. Zuckerberg did some parsing of how mobile usage breaks out among the mobile web and native iOS and Android apps. But at the higher strategic level of monetization, Zuckerberg didn't say anything that wasn't already published in Facebook's IPO prospectus: the Facebook mobile experience must take the ads sequestered on the right-hand column on desktop applications and insert them directly into a mobile user's timeline.

Is conquering mobile to serve advertising at all consistent with "making the world more open and connected?"

Zuckerberg did say one thing I found endearing. "Everything I do breaks. But we fix it quickly."

Twitter Advertising

My "Send Twitter a Dollar" campaign on Tumblr has not gone viral.

I do notice, however, a recent uptick in traffic to two posts on this blog about the efforts of my son, Dan Carleton, to come up with ways to extract, suppress, bury, eliminate ads from my Twitter timeline. And you can do the same, thanks to Dan!

On the web, that is.

Here is an ad that showed up on my iPhone Twitter stream just now. An ad about using ads to get more Twitter followers. I'll also screenshoot a tweet about juicing buzz about your speech for President by paying to have it trend.

Seems like cheating to me. On top of poor taste.

I regularly report the accounts serving ads as spammers. We'll see how long that function lasts!

Unpack the diction

It's a truism, of course: the words you deploy in a dialogue will predetermine your conclusion.

It's been a while, however, since I've seen this demonstrated as clearly in a non-political, public debate.

I'm speaking of the back of forth in the blogosphere on the costs of Twitter's choice to be ad-supported, and the question of whether a paid-for, ad-free Twitter might succeed.

Watch the use of the word "free."

It's descriptive and it characterizes the absence of a monetary transaction between the Twitter user/content-creator and Twitter the provider/publisher. So on one level, it's fair to say Twitter is a "free" service.

But the word "free" as so used brings dividends that have not been earned.

"Free" is charged with connotations, all of them highly positive. To be free is to be self-directed and self-authenticating. "Free" is also a verb to express the application of power to liberate some thing, some capacity, or some person. These connotations do not fairly apply to an exchange which requires the user to expose herself to advertising.

Somewhat paradoxically, something given freely, or as part of a free exchange, also obligates the recipient, morally. One is called upon to reciprocate. This sense of the word free is, I think, apt in the Twitter debate. Because Twitter is "free," the implication goes, one is being a bad sport not to endure the advertising cheerfully.

There's a canny sleight-of-hand happening, too, to permit "free" to resonate in so many different directions at once. You know my predisposition on this topic. But when people say Twitter is a "free service," I think they are overreaching. If they were wanting to be precise, they would say, "Twitter is a service that is offered free of charge."

Photo by Bradley Stabler of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen sculpture in Cleveland / Flickr.

Fred Wilson weighs in on ad-supported Twitter

Among the many things that make Fred Wilson's blog the best: he posts every day; he gets great comments and engages with his community; and he weighs in on challenges as they surface.

Today he has posted on the renewed, philosophical challenge to Twitter's decision to pursue an ad-based business. The defense Fred advances, and that gets thrashed out in the comments, continues, I think, to largely be framed in terms of the tried-and-true viablity of the free or fremium model. Time again, the argument goes, experience shows that is what people want, that is what allows new services to scale.

Framed as "free," you've predetermined your conclusion because your language has already dismissed the payment or tax exacted from users, in terms of their time, their mind share, the mix of conscious thought and subconscious emotion that is manipulated in order to influence individual motivation.

I can see person after person in the AVC community commenting that they don't mind promoted tweets - can either look right past them or even find them useful! - and I have to acknowledge they may reflect a plurality, or a majority.

Photo: by epha / Flickr.

"Too important to be ad-supported"

I just signed up, through a Kickstarter-like campaign, to support California entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell and his team in their efforts to bring a commercial Twitter-alternative to market.

Caldwell does a succinct job articulating what's wrong with committing a global public utility like Twitter to the tired, unambitious, user-hostile (my adjectives, not his, except maybe for the third one) ad-based revenue model. Make users the focus!

If you love Twitter, regard yourself at least as much as a producer or participant as a consumer, value your time and mind-share, and haven't already checked out Caldwell's posts on the proposed Twitter-alternative, go to this post on his blog.

Not claiming originality in the critique of both Twitter and Facebook expressed on this blog over the past couple years, but what Caldwell says aligns with the thoughts developed here over time and collected under the tag, Ad-Free Commercial Web.

Four things I can think of to do in the meantime:

• Re-visit identi.ca and reflect further about that experience;
• Use Dan Carleton's tool to block sponsored tweets from your desktop Twitter timeline;
• Report as spam any sponsored tweets that show up in your mobile timeline (I'm doing it; I like to think it's retarding the frequency, though I imagine Twitter may block that reporting function at some point);
• Send Twitter a Dollar, to signal that you'd be willing to pay.

Image: "The Twitter bird escaped," by Frederik Hermann / Flickr.

More on Facebook monetization

Glenn Kelman has a nice post on the corporate Redfin blog this week.

He's talking about Facebook monetization, and makes a very strong case that the arithmetic for Facebook's public market valuation can't be supported by display advertising. (It's apparent that Glenn thinks carefully about size of markets, rates comparables; part of his job, no doubt.)

Two things I especially like about his post.

One, he talks about how developers value the platform in a different way than do financial types. Because of Facebook, he says, Redfin can know a lot more about a user when she logs in to Redfin than it would otherwise. (He's not talking about me, though. I opted out of being a Facebook user, and I wish that information about identity could be leveraged so ubiquitously from an open system.)

Two, I like how Glenn assumes Facebook might monetize by charging users for services. (Though he thinks they have been smart, so far, to have "focused on growing the cow, not getting more milk."

As for advertising, if that does remain a part of Facebook's monetization strategy, longer-term, I hope the company finds a way to respect, rather than exploit, users' earnest engagement. Particularly if Facebook is going to embed advertising in user newsfeeds, it should share the ad revenue with the participating users.

Photo: "SR 520 Toll Booth - 1979," Washington State Department of Transportation / Flickr.