It was only a matter of time before the excessive use of advertising on myspace and other networks started to irritate the hell out of people.
According to a study by ComScore, users are spending 14% less time on social networks than 4 months ago.
As few as 4 in 10,000 people (0.04%) who see ads on social networks click on them, compared to 20 in 10,000 (0.2%) across the web.
Myspace and Facebook realised this and started introducing disasters like Beacon. Last year myspace started automatically posting on users' home pages notifications of their friends' favorite products.
Instead of finding a relevant way of monetising their sites, these social networks (no doubt under pressure from their shareholders) applied advertising in a very traditional and very intrusive manner.
Social networks is NOT the biggest opportunity in advertising, because it's not about the number of eyeballs anymore and its not about pushing messages anymore.
People's social network pages are private spaces for connecting and sharing with friends. When brands enter that picture and they do it through forcing their way in i.e. advertising, they just piss people off.
Brands should be helping people connect and share things better. Provide tools.
Think beyond the message.
I extracted the stats from an article that appeared in Businessweek
The advertising that I see on Facebook is the biggest load of shyte ever - stuff like "you're the millionth person to see this banner click to claim your prize", or "stop smoking now, find out how"... Completely irrelevant and missing the point of all that fabulous information I've put about myself there.
I honestly don't think I'd mind some relevant messages regarding products I'd actually be interested in. Surely that's the promise of these networks to advertisers??
Posted by: Dave | February 11, 2008 at 10:55 AM