If there's any element of this bubble that reminds me of the previous it is that there are still an awful lot of startups out there who are trying to simply acquire as many users as possible with vague plans to figure out how to make money later... and they all seem to come up with the same, "Uh... shove ads at them, I guess?" plan in the end.
Here's how advertising works from its creator's point of view. There are a few principles abstract enough that you can apply to any piece of advertising. Good advertising positions itself within a market, develops a brand image, establishes its product as a good product (not even necessarily better-than: as long as you look trustworthy and people know your name, you'll sell). The bulk of ad research, meanwhile, goes into studying individual forms. TV ads. Product placement in films. Radio spots. Magazine spots. There's a series of long-tested techniques which advertisers rely on. Even these techniques usually fail, because plenty of advertisers are fucking idiots who don't get that ads are a creative medium, and if you're formulaic rather than creative, you'll sell jack shit.
The challenge of the Internet is that every web site has its own unique form. Most of these forms weren't even designed for ads (Facebook at least knew how they wanted to sell ads; Twitter still has no clue). To sell on Twitter is different from selling on Facebook is different from selling on Reddit or Tumblr or Pinterest or Instagram. There's no formula. And some of these sites are so limited that advertisers simply have no clue how to push their shitty little message out to suckers, ahem, consumers.
The fix, of course, is that instead of selling a brand you start interesting conversations, create dialogues that engage people with the thing you're selling, even start communities of people who revolve around your product. But advertisers aren't bright enough or genuine enough or ambitious enough to do this the right way. Community-building especially: nobody wants to join a forum for a product that isn't a car. Yet some people persist in thinking that if they build it, fans will come.
One future of advertising looks like the Deck Network, where people so trust the advertisers that they'll click on the ads willingly. One's the model Facebook is still struggling with: connect super-small businesses with precisely the people who want to buy their product. These anti-Facebook ads stories recently only show that you have to be smarter advertising on Facebook than you'd have to be in a newspaper. The really good Facebook ads get friends talking about them, because they really are something that those people enjoy. But that runs counter to how advertisers think about their sheep, goddammit I mean targets, no wait that doesn't sound nice either.
The real bubble is: stop treating people like products, start treating them like people. That means fewer start-ups designed to sucker people into wanting some bullshit connection they never really needed (YC has some exactly like this), fewer advertisers looking down at the masses like they're ripe for the picking, fewer businesses geared toward herding people up and selling them wholesale. The more freedom you give people w/r/t how they consume media and how they express themselves, the harder it is to trap them in your crap. Ultimately it becomes more profitable to just treat them like human beings, and act like a human yourself. But plenty of products will die when this happens because plenty of products were never intended for human consumption in the first place.
Personally I think the problem isn't people doing an awful job, it's attention. On the TV they frequently interrupt your program but you'll endure it as the content is longer than the ad. Same with Radio. In Magazines and Papers they constantly jiggle around all the content so you have to at least scan the page to see if it's an advert or an article which means they have at least a chance to grab your attention.
Web ads cannot grab your attention because the content they surround is bite-sized so any attempt to interrupt is so much more jarring. They tried a few different ways and generally they failed. The worst new one is the put an ad in the middle of the text, but that too is incredibly jarring and confusing. Another example is the attempt to monetize funny videos by putting a 15 sec ad clip in front of it. But quite often this is as long as the content! Do people even try and endure the ad? I'd love to see the numbers. If I click play on a random video and an ad starts I usually skip to the next article rather than watch the ad.
Also when you get into something like Facebook the adverts sit in the same place every time. Which you learn to skip automatically very quickly as you're usually not interested in them. You never have to play hunt the article apart from the very occasional site that has the full page popups which generally means you will start avoiding that site.
But worse for advertisers, if they make them too intrusive people can just turn them off. Brilliant!
The only ad I've recently seen that made me think, hmm, this could work are the occasional full page background adverts they run on IMDB.
Also Facebook didn't used to have ads, they just added them to the side of the page at one point. And I doubt the future of ads does look like the Deck Network, it's just another advertising network. They seem to be teaching some strange ideas at your college, I'd be interested to see the data that backs it up.
Nothing in your essay has anything to do with advertising not being a bubble. Sure, it depends on your definition of "bubble," but in the sense that I imagine most people understand it (over-hyped marketplaces leading to inflated, unsustainable valuations), you didn't refute nor address the concept at all.
In fact, a lot of your post could be used to support jerf's point. The methodologies that you're saying are worthless actually have huge advertising budgets behind them. Inflated value over true, intrinsic value = bubble.
Also, this statement:
>> "One future of advertising looks like the Deck Network, where people so trust the advertisers that they'll click on the ads willingly."
This goes without saying, but click's aren't the intrinsic value of ads. There has to be a transaction at some point for the value to be justified from the advertisers standpoint. It's actually pretty ironic that in your shining example about advertising's golden future, you stop short of the true value of advertising.
>>"The real bubble is: stop treating people like products, start treating them like people."
?
i was recently at a party, near Vienna, Austria. lots of thirty somethings, all educated, various jobs.
i asked a simple question: has anyone of you clicked on a digital ad? ever?
no one. now, of course, sample size, anecdote, yaddayadda. i never clicked on an ad (hell, i block them). no one i know clicks on them. the only time people really get "engaged" by an ad is when it is annoying - everyone has a hateful story about those.
is there really tangible, hard evidence that online ads lead to actual sales? and if so, who the heck are the people actually clicking on them?
Also, if you have to be smarter to effectively advertise on Facebook, isn't that a sign that they are charging too much?
I'm excited at the possibilities that will arise after the fall of Facebook and the decline of web advertising.
But why were all these advertisers so willing to be wooed in the first place?
Because there's a very real (and growing) hole in the advertising landscape. With the erosion of TV advertising as a reliable way to generate mass impressions at scale, advertisers are anxious to find a replacement. TV is still the largest advertising vechicle, by media spend, for most F500 companies (if not all of them?). But premiums on TV are growing each year, even while total ratings are declining, audiences are dispersing (both across networks and onto other platforms), and ads are basically avoidable. While the bloom was on the Facebook rose, it seemed like a hell of a savior to people desperately seeking one.
The fallacy underpinning the leap from TV onto the Facebook bandwagon was the assumption that social media could be bought, and advertised on, in pretty much the same way as TV. In reality, the advertiser needs to be much more savvy and sophisticated about social advertising. He needs to worry about more than just reach, frequency, and CPMs. He'll need to consider the quality of his content, refresh rates for content, geo-targeting and context-targeting, the relevancy algorithms powering his anticipated reach and engagement figures, and the micro-segments to which he serves different ads at different times. Instead, right now he's spent the last few years simply throwing giant checks at Facebook and expecting TV reach, impressions, etc.
I'd consider both parties at fault here: the advertisers for being naive, and Facebook for playing to the deep-pocketed suckers. Picking the low-hanging fruit, in this case, may have set back Facebook's credibility within the advertising community for quite some time. And it also set expectations that Facebook wasn't, and still isn't, prepared to meet. (In fairness, I'm sure Facebook received a great deal of pressure to take the easy ad money in order to make its books look as attractive as possible in anticipation of the IPO).
So when I say we seem to be in an advertising bubble, it's not a statement that there isn't a revolution in advertising coming that somebody is going to profit from, it's a statement that it isn't coming at the pace people like Facebook are promising, nor can it sustain that level of investment profitably. I did make sure to call out Google for having legitimately advanced the field. If the bubble pops they'll get hit, but I have every confidence they'll survive and thrive, because they definitely have real value, just as Amazon has survived and thrived after the last bubble.
(I expect somewhere in the 5-15 years time frame there's going to be a robotics bubble too, and it won't be because robots that can coexist with us in our houses and streets won't be every bit as revolutionary as the hype claims, it just won't be revolutionary as quickly as the investment would require.)
If you own a small business, for instance, it's incredibly gratifying to hear ads for your business on the radio. It makes you feel good about yourself. It makes it hard to make a rational calculation that spending $X on ads brings in $Y more profit, and that $Y > $X. Even if you're rational, there's some other guy who's not who is going to drive up rates.
Many big companies spend heavily, even buy TV networks, so they can bombard the public with "feel good" messages that don't have a clear role in a conversion funnel. For instance, GE bought NBC and you can't go five minutes without seeing some ad trying to convince people that GE is this great innovative company trying to save the Earth -- although generally the products involved aren't for retail sale and the only rational purpose for these ads, at best, is an effort to influence the political climate. What's the ROI on that?
Google ads have started to puncture this bubble because once you have advertising that's measurable, it's hard to justify the expense for something that's not.
I'd go a step beyond that and say if there is any bubble, it is based on a large number of people targeting market share of a market with a fairly constant size, advertising spend.
Everytime you add a company trying to get advertising dollars, those dollars have to come from some other company and making advertising more efficient doesn't nessisarily mean Cheif Marketing Officers will increase marketing spend.
Google isn't ASS, because Google ads aren't really ads. They're more like the shelf slots that Safeway sells to food vendors. Google is a store - the world's biggest store, browsed by full-text search.
(In fact, if I was Goog, I'd separate the UI into two intents, with a radiobutton or something: either you're shopping, or you're searching for information. The latter is a free, spamless service that supports the former.)
I think FB will have to learn to make its money the old-fashioned way - by providing valuable services. FB is a valuable service - it makes $5 per user a year, from ads. How many FB users would drop the service if they had to pay $5 a year? And how many other services can FB add? Dropbox anyone? Dropbox isn't ASS...
Advertising is a crappy way of funding services. It chiefly exists because of payment friction. Startups are supposed to be the future. Is crap the future? Is your project ASS? Great, but have a plan to exit before the ASS bubble pops. Some of us remember the first era of "eyeball valuation"...
Yes, they may succeed, but pivots at that scale are risky, and there's no margin for risk built into the facebook share price. That's a problem.
Am I the only one that finds this hard to believe? Why is Facebook in a good position to authorize payments? They have very few credit cards on file. Besides FarmVille, et al, who exactly is giving their credit card info to Facebook?
In what context am I supposed to use Facebook to pay for things? If we're talking about mobile, then we're talking about smartphones. What exactly makes you think Google/Apple are going to lay down and give the keys to the mobile payment castle to Facebook? Google and Apple already have our credit card info, we all already buy things through Apple and Google, and it is a logical step that I would use that same process for buying something with my smartphone in a store.
I don't think it is a logical step for me to pull out my smartphone, open my Facebook app and use it to pay for something, anymore than it makes sense to use my Twitter app to pay, or Instagram for that matter.
In fact, if we're going to use a third party app to pay for things, I have an app from my bank, why not use that?
I just don't see Facebook getting in to mobile payments...
You're going to use your bank for payments because you already have low-cost ways to make payments already (ie. checks, debit and credit cards).
But... there are millions of people in the US who operate outside of the banking system. They are mostly poor or working off the books in some form. For these folks, the idea of buying a $100 topoff card at a gas station to have access to mobile payments makes sense. How do I know this? Becuase the same folks are paying $5 for a disposable debit card today.
If I'm paying a friend, why not use PayPal, or Bump, or just cash?
I don't know if Facebook will be a successful business, or if more convenient ways of communicating will appear in the future, but the ability to let me easily communicate with all my friends and family is as earth-changing as I'm going to need it.
Well that is like asking what comes next in the stock market. If anyone knows, then they're the next billionaires ;)
Payments is an amazing opportunity for them. One click, Purchase With Facebook. The payment processing game is all about the network effect. Dwolla is innovative but they need an "eBay" for them to gain massive usage. Facebook doesn't need it.
Facebook can destroy eBay by creating a marketplace + their own payment processor. Facebook is the only company that can break eBay's monopoly of the online marketplace and payments. This field is ripe for disruption and in the game of network effect Facebook is unstoppable.
I can see them moving into enterprise too. Maybe teaming up with Micosoft's Office 365 to create an awesome enterprise social network with Office 365 built in.
Online gambling laws are starting to become loose. This can be huge for not only zynga but for many, many other massive companies who would love to use the social graph for the gambling. Example: BetFair and Bwin.
One of the red flags was what you described. The external service providers can pull the plug whenever they want. They can steal your idea, they can charge you for using their API. Of course, if you are lucky they might buy you, but I don't foresee too many 1 billion dollar acquisitions from Facebook in the future.
The author making the fundamental mistake of assuming that all web sites are the same, and that's obviously false. Just because Facebook is (in his view) a ad-supported website doesn't mean that it is interchangeable with any other ad-supported website.
The WWW was here before Facebook. To even raise that possibility shows people completely lack a sense of proportion. Facebook and Google can disappear from the WWW and the WWW will stay there just like it was before these companies came along.
Google wants publishers to make high quality content, but they don't understand that the ROI for that model is often piss poor, and very unfeasible for small, beginning publishers.
Once it became possible to measure the effectiveness of transactional ads online, it became a lot harder to justify the cost of display ads.
The advertising apocalypse won't just affect the internet, it will affect traditional media. On the few cases where I watch cable or OTA TV I'm shocked that the ads are 5-10% relevant to me -- it seems like much of the industry is kept alive by ambulance-chasing lawyers, credit repair services and the medicare economy.
(2) Facebook has other ways to make money, and in a pinch, they'll develop them -- it's believable that they could increase revenue 2-3x in a year or two if they really had to... Largely because they haven't had intense pressure to increase revenue. Facebook Credits, for instance, could be a gold mine if you could buy more things with them.
The level of interest in Google+ reflects "the fallacy of Facebook" as well, it is the same effect: why would people continue to expose themselves like that?
Social media with a purpose, like LinkedIn and similar, are good for business contacts. Facebook and Google+ simply aren't a business environment.
The purpose of Facebook and Google+ is to mine data and sell ads. IMO that is a broken business model, because at some point privacy will inevitably become a barrier.
I strongly feel that C1SPA will be a strong part of Facebook's financial future.
Imagine letting me auction off my corner of the Facebook graph to companies that bid for it and I trust to sell it to. I get paid, Facebook gets a cut, and everybody is happy because I retain control over my data and the company who gets it knows they have a valuable, trusting customer and not just some apathetic eyeballs.
I don't think this is realistic at all, but it would be a way to calm privacy fears and revolutionize web advertising. As it is, most people I know just use adblock, because internet advertising is absolutely terrible. But -- and this is saying something from somebody like me who despises ads -- it doesn't have to be.
56? Profit-to-earnings?
