Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, delivered a keynote address at the f8 conference and announced that Facebook was making a few changes. Since then the Internet has been a chatter over all sorts of complaints about the changes, but what do they really mean?
First, if you’re one of the 800 million Facebook users that log on every day, you should know that those changes weren’t meant for you.
Sure, you might benefit from a few of them. You might like them, or you might not. But the changes aren’t for you. The changes were meant for advertisers and for Facebook’s shareholders. Plain and simple.
If you watch television, then you’re well aware that you get to watch many channels for free. Other than the electricity it costs you to have programming delivered for you, you don’t pay a cent unless you pay for Cable or satellite TV. TV stations deliver free content to your home every day and every night for your enjoyment, but that content isn’t really free. It costs you nothing, but someone is paying for it. That someone are the TV show sponsors.
TV sponsors are willing to pay for network time to get their product and branding message in front of you in hopes that they might persuade you to make a purchase. In the same spirit, advertisers are waiting in line to get their messages to you on Facebook. They want your business.
Facebook has spent a lot of time thinking about how you use their free service. Advertisers have to. And the shareholders of Facebook got together with the advertisers to devise a plan for the former to make a profit while the latter take their message to you on a free platform you are using every day. That’s what those changes mean – to you, to advertisers, and to Facebook shareholders.
Now the question is, What are you going to do? My guess is, like most other Facebook users, you will continue to use the free service just as before and eventually you’ll adapt to the advertising being thrown in your face. Looks like the cost of free isn’t so free after all, is it?
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