But their current product, although very powerful in its options, lacks a lot when it comes to value and creativity. That is another matter for another day. But the title of this post was written due to my rage upon seeing a proliferation of very shitty ads. Don’t mean to abuse the French, but there is no alternative for the mess of promotions that have been popping up on the right side of my screen.

I decided to showcase them each, why they suck ( or why they are good if one comes up ), and why it negatively affects Facebook’s revenue stream as a whole.

Play This Quiz. Sign up For $100 ringtone membership!

Its hard not to get excited seeing anything Family Guy. And when you combine the word “quiz” and any pop culture TV show of the last decade, you are bound to run up contestants.

I took the plunge, and intentionally got every question wrong. It was by far the easiest quiz anyone can take for anything. If you gave me a quiz that only told me to spell the word spoon, which would be already printed on my quiz, I would reply that the Family Guy quiz put more sweat on my brow.

I am transferred to a page where I have to sign-up for a monthly subscription of ringtones. Since there is no contract, I could end up with months of a service my Samsung phone from the 20th century would be unable to use. I fail the quiz, and they still try to lure into something I don’t want.

Here ye Here ye! The Google Money System!

This ad just plain reeks of “click me and you’ll be sorry”. I usually click these knowing I am spending someones money for wasting my precious Facebook time. Off we go into the one-page infomercial land!

And in this webpage, it speaks of a laid-off accountant named Kevin ( who happens to live in the city next to me? Better luck next time, IP-locating robot! ) who has found a great way making money with Google money system. For some odd reason, I have never found this feature in their Google labs. Hmmm.

The kicker to this whole crack-pot scheme is this quote, hopefully to someday make someone else- other than me- spit out their coffee in fantastical laughter:

Google – How can you go wrong with a company that is publicly traded on the stock market with record stock prices even right now.

Yes. How can anyone go wrong with record stock prices? Especially when to whole sentence is poppycock madness AND doesn’t have a question mark at the end of it.

This is the picture of the douchebag who is posting the crap ad on Facebook. His name is Kevin. And he is a douche. I know this is probably not him, but someone has to pay!

Fluid Consulting

The company put out a decent ad. They are a business looking to develop websites and web solutions. When I clicked and went to the site, I was highly disappointed, but not because it was a scam or misleading.

Overall, the company lacks 21st century. For a site that is promoting websites, its own website is lacking a lot in terms of design and information. The header image looks like a blog graphic from 2001. They have no portfolio, but an email that implies that I must request one. At the same time, they talk about working with over 200 businesses. It isn’t that I don’t trust them, it is that I have no clue what their work is. Their whole website setup is pretty shabby, and their asking price for a “simple” website is $1,500.

From there, you can say they are doing something wrong, choosing the direction of overpricing the hell out of their clients, or taking the Robert Frost road of re-inventing the wheel on these designs. Their footer has a copyright ending in 2007. They haven’t updated their site! Sound the alarm! Man the hatches!

I give them props for being an actual company with an actual product on Facebook.

Why Facebook Will Lose Revenue From this Measure

Facebook’s system of adspace is very similar to Google’s. They also have a better framework developed for promoting to localized areas ( such as cities and colleges ). But they still have many problems ( even problems in their emulation of Google, but that is for another post ).

These ads are destroying their ability to make money. The CTR for many of these ads are already low because of the social networking paradigm. They only will go lower as the quality of ads decreases. As this decreases, it will do two things that will really hurt the revenue stream.

The first is that the inverse of a low CTR is a higher CPC. As many advertisers, old and new, come back to use the solution, more and more will be turned off be the suggested and minimum bid amounts to keep their product showcase afloat. As this occurs, the people who can least afford the constant Facebook campaign will slowly drop out the revenue stream. Considering that Shoemoney talked about the future use of Facebook for more localized advertising, there has to be greater importance of keeping some type of quality on the right side so the traffic drive can be constant.

The 2nd thing is the dulling, or saturation, of bad advertising material. Quizzes, bait-and-switch programs, making money schemes. Individually, or as controlled campaigns, individual marketers do well in gaining an audience. But proliferated onto specific adspaces or within specific websites, and the user will ignore any message from that area.

This is more dangerous to Facebook’s future for if they have trouble keeping people interested in their ads, then their adspace becomes less valuable. They lose money, and would probably have to concede even more quality for some revenue. The spiraling down continues, and their advantage of having valuable adspace is forever gone.

Facebook needs to overhaul their entire means of creating revenue, and getting local businesses on the scene. they have to mitigate some of these scurvy ads mentioned above, and probably on occasion pause their ads and give some white space for the user. Get the quality of ads back on Facebook, and advitisers like me will continue to pay the premium.