DNHeadlines Exchange

I can’t help myself but to be drawn to Facebook articles in the media ever since “the incident”.

This morning I happened across a post by TheDomains in the News section. It references an article by Michael Arrington about how Facebook is possibly suffering from a 100% advertiser click-through fraud rate. I really should put suffering in quotation marks, as in ‘they are “suffering”…’, but didnt want to confuse my underlying opinion with what TheDomains or Mr. Arrington actually wrote.

To find that article, I admit it, I felt a slight glow from within; Facebook got drawn out of their corner by someone with some muscle, and finally has to address the problem. Or do they..

A long time ago I was complaining to Facebook about their advertising program, not only over their questionable 3rd party advertising policies and practices, but their click-through math…the best result I got was a one week ban / account shut-down (I’ll concede that they may have done that by accident, but hardly the response I was hoping for). Needless to say, I haven’t complained since that, and simply resigned to the fact that Facebook is yet another site with an undercurrent of the wild west, so better to join them than fight them.

I guess it takes a heavy hand to make waves with Facebook, a common biproduct of a company that has no really useful communications system with it’s members (certainly none with any accountability), and no brick-and-mortar for a face-to-face chat. Along comes Mr. Arrington with his fancy TechCrunch armed with 775,000 Twitter followers, a PR of 8 and an Alexa of approx. 1,000, and HE gets an answer. Can Michael be the catalyst for change? Facebook has to do something. They may have a monster site, but they have a hell of a time monetizing it and have very few alternatives for revenue. They can’t afford to not deal with this, but I suspect that they’ll go the way of acting like a Fortune 500 company and suggest that sweeping changes take time, (forget the fact that they operate in the most dynamic environment on earth) and we need to bear with it, because “they are on it”.

One might wonder why, since Facebook controls such a large chuck of the internet’s socialsphere for whom a truly quality environment is one with an apparent abundance of transparency, they didn’t just take their lumps and adopt a proactive stance right from the beginning and announce that they are dealing with everyone’s complaints with mighty broad strokes and sweeping changes before someone like Mr. Arrington steps up to the plate and calls them on it? Now Facebook looks like they always do when it comes to addressing the complaints of the masses; slow to the punch, true lack of concern, sterile responses (much like their web site), and influenced by the media.

It isn’t like they care about domain arbitrage and have to chase away any abuse. After all, they are Facebook. They are still growing. They just doubled their membership in eight months.

Perhaps Facebook is like McDonalds; not a good idea to consume too much of it, but super tasty when you need a fix and you don’t care that it is bad for you, the majority of it’s fans are the same age, and the person you are dealing with really doesn’t care one way or the other what your particular problem is.

Maybe Facebook and McDonalds should get together and start McFacebook.

UPDATE
I love TechCrunch – they’ve posted an update to their investigation into Facebook click fraud.