BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Facebook's COO Asks Users to Click a Few Ads

This article is more than 10 years old.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO, managed to break one of the cardinal rules about internet advertising in a recent speech at Harvard. She asked the students to make sure that they clicked through a few ads: that's a real no no.

Sandberg, who visited her alma mater with her parents and two children, only once made reference to the IPO in her speech. After urging the graduates to use Facebook to stay in touch, she said: "We're public now, so could you please click on an ad or two while you're there."

Now yes, of course, it's a joke, a throwaway line in a speech. It will have gained some chuckles from the audience even if not belly laughs.

However, this is one of the problems that some forsee with Facebook now being a public company. Senior executives cannot do as they did when it was a private company: unfortunately the rules are different. This particular little joke almost certainly won't backfire: very few advertisers are going to complain or make a fuss about such an off the cuff remark. But it is still a breach of the terms of almost all advertising networks, encouraging people to click through ads just for the same of garnering the revenue from their doing so.

A blog can be, indeed probably will be, thrown out of Google Adwords if a blogger encouraged his readers to do that. Assuming that Google got to hear about it that is.

Just to be clear here: I do not think she was encouraging click fraud, it was a joke. But it's the sort of joke that a senior executive of a public company probably shouldn't really be making.