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Facebook and Instagram, The Sounds of Desperation

This article is more than 10 years old.

Instagram's PR disaster yesterday is a sign a growing consumer backlash against the use of their data or web content for advertising (Instagram backed down today). That's what makes me ask how long can they last as a business?

Facebook's big problem continues to be how to monetize in a way that befits a company with a billion monthly users.

Next up is allowing advertisers to insert videos into people's timelines:

According to “several industry executives”, the social media site would soon allow advertisers to insert video ads into users’ timelines—the length of such videos would supposedly be capped at 15 seconds.

The backlash has been some time in coming but I wrote about it here in the context of Google's new Communities. One view is that Google has begun competing with Facebook in the only area that Facebook has a clear advantage, to date, in its ad inventory, putting further pressure on the social network to come up with something different.

In essence, though, Google and Facebook have business models that are at odds with the relationships they create with users. Given that the model is to exploit the user, then long term friction is baked-in to the deal.

Andre Durand, CEO at Ping Identity, who I interviewed for that post, takes the view that ultimately these business models have to turn around and support the user in his/her interactions with the consumer-vendor community. Instead of using all kinds of ways to advertise at me in my private moments, help me, support my lifestyle, be the guardian of my data on my behalf.

That view has long been propagated by the vendor relationship community. As we can see this week, it's time is now overdue.

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