Misdirected Facebook backlash

Some people seem surprised today that Facebook, a radical disruption in digital media if ever we saw one, isn't a very good platform for the old model of monetisation via banner ads.

Banner ads! Scott Karp swiftly debunks the notion that banner ads could ever have been the solution here. Banner ads are what media first came up with when we still thought in terms of things "moving online" and tried to replicate the old print/TV/etc model of surrounding (or - for a while back there - even interrupting) content with marginally relevant commercial messages. Nice idea if you think attention is still abundant - if you haven't already see Umair here on why it's not (ppt). That banners don't work on Facebook shouldn't make us worry about Facebook but it should make us worry about banners.

If you think of the Internet as a new way of delivering content, sure, you'll look for ways to monetise social networks as content businesses. Hence banners. But the Internet isn't about the content, it's about the conversation. Facebook's disruption is to make the conversation more relevant by keeping it within closed communities centered, from the point of view of each user, upon that user. Google's world-beating innovation was to add relevant commercial value to online content. That taps a fraction of the potential value of the web: the fraction that is about the content. It doesn't have to be Facebook that figures out the way of adding relevant commercial value to online conversations, but it'll be something that looks a lot like Facebook. And right now, no-one else is even in the running.