OPAD Winner: Gary Hendrickson
Time to announce another One Page A Day winner! Today’s winner is Gary Hendrickson, The Auction Rebel. Gary makes a full-time living selling on eBay and his blog is full of advice at how to be successful as an eBay seller, with great tips like 6 Tips For Part-Time eBay Sellers or Where Do I Put This Book?. Check out his great site!
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Has Facebook Jumped the Shark?
As a university lecturer, my wife occasionally gets a glimpse of what today’s young adults are excited about, no matter how perplexing that excitement might be, and sometimes she passes those tidbits on to me. Something one of her students told her this week has left me wondering if Facebook has jumped the shark and is about to die a slow, lingering death.
The Facebook Phenomenon
By all accounts, Facebook is an Internet phenomenon. What started out as an exclusive site for university and college students (you needed a college email address to sign up) has grown into a global social networking site on the same scale as MySpace. According to Alexa, and I know Alexa’s numbers aren’t perfect, Facebook ranks #6 globally. (The top 5 as of today are: Yahoo!, YouTube, Windows Live, Google and MySpace. One could argue, though, that the Google and YouTube numbers should be combined, since they’re both owned by Google, which would make Google either #1 or #2. But I digress.) Here’s the latest traffic snapshot:
Looks great, doesn’t it? A steady upward growth that any site would be thrilled to have. Facebook’s even been in the news lately for nabbing two high-profile Google executives. So what makes me think that Facebook may have jumped the shark?
Facebook “isn’t interesting”
Back to my wife’s student. According to her, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Facebook isn’t interesting anymore to me and my friends.”
OK, that’s a sample size of 1. Or maybe more than one, since she implied it wasn’t just her. Do a bit of digging, though, and you find others expressing similar views:
- Quitting Facebook
- Are the cool kids leaving Facebook?
- Who will give students their Facebook back?
- Why I quit Facebook
If Facebook’s core constituency is slowly leaving, where does that leave Facebook?
More Numbers
Back to the Alexa numbers. Traffic is up, but it looks like the average page views per visitor are going down:
In fact, the average number of pages viewed per unique visitor this week was 23, down from 26 page views a few months ago. Looking at the graph, there was a definite dip at the beginning of February, although I’m not sure what caused that. I do know my wife’s students are concerned with the privacy issues around personalized advertising that Facebook introduced last fall to a lot of flack.
SocialAds: The Facebook Shark
Ten years from now, historians will try to define exactly when Facebook jumped the shark. There are two strong possibilities: when Facebook opened itself to everyone, or when it introduced the SocialAds advertising system.
My bet is on the latter, because of the negative publicity and privacy concerns it engendered. The aforementioned student referred to it, as have others in the commentaries I’ve followed online. While people rarely object to a shopping site making recommendations based on past purchases, having a social networking site passing along information about your preferences and purchases seems to cross an unwritten line in the sand. Too much like Big Brother, it would seem.
Of course, I have no idea if Facebook is in decline or not. This is all speculation on my part. Only the Facebook execs know for sure, and maybe that’s why they went out looking for talented individuals to help them beat back the shark and still make decent money (a problem for many social networking sites).
If I were them, though, I’d be worried.
P.S.: Eric Giguere on Facebook
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Google Bans Deceptive AdSense Ad Placements
It took them long enough, but Google has finally put the kabosh on deceptive ad placements. Specifically:
- You can’t place ads under misleading titles or headings; and
- You can’t blend the ads such that they’re indistinguishable from other content.
This is not a ban against ad blending in general — choosing ad colors to match the color scheme of the rest of the page — but a ban against ad placements that are specifically designed to fool the user into thinking the ads are not ads, but content.
I’ve seen some egregious placements over the years. I remember once reading an ebook that specifically recommended you use a heading like “Top 10 Methods To Stop Smoking” followed by a large rectangle ad unit and then a list of 6 stop-smoking tips. This made it seem like the ads (which would normally — but not always! — show 4 ads) were part of the list. That kind of reader duping is now specifically forbidden.
Google Improving the Content Network
These measures are part of Google’s overall strategy of improving the quality of the sites in the Google Content Network, which includes us AdSense publishers. AdWords advertisers can now use demographics to target the content network . Many of the recent messages from Google to its AdWords customers have been trying to encourage advertisers to try the Content Network.
It may be that Google is seeing slower growth in its core search advertising business and has therefore renewed focus on the contextual advertising business. It’s too bad it’s taken so long for these things to happen, though.
See also Search Engine Roundtable.
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.