The social graft
"Once every hundred years media changes," boy-coder turned big-thinker Mark Zuckerberg declared today at the Facebook Social Advertising Event in New York City. And it's true. Look back over the last millennium or two, and you'll see that every century, like clockwork, there's been a big change in media.
Context & Ripple Effects
Zuckerberg's keynote lands three weeks after he opened the Web 2.0 conference in a Q&A with John Battelle, and against a backdrop the industry has been tracking all year: an unresolved lawsuit over Facebook's origins and, since August, unconfirmed reports that observers are waiting for him to answer calls for open standards and a portable social graph. The Social Advertising Event is his answer of a different kind — instead of opening the graph, Facebook is monetizing it.
The story traveled fast on day one: the New York Times framed the product as marketing members' brand preferences "with your permission," its Bits blog flagged what it called Facebook's next privacy problem, and Facebook's own blog announced the ads. Nick Carr's Rough Type post cuts against the launch rhetoric, mocking the "once every hundred years" framing as grandiosity wrapped around an ad product.
First-order effects
- Advertisers gain a channel that converts members' stated brand preferences and activity into endorsements distributed through their friends' feeds, with Facebook presenting participation as opt-in.
- Members' on-site behavior and off-site purchases become targeting and distribution material visible to their contacts — the exposure the Bits blog immediately cast as the platform's next privacy problem.
Second-order effects
- By making the social graph itself the ad inventory, Facebook raises the stakes of the open-standards fight: portability of member connections now threatens the asset base advertisers are paying for, and the response observers awaited as of August remains unconfirmed.
- Rival social networks face pressure to field comparable friend-carried ad formats or cede premium brand budgets to Facebook's graph.
Third-order effects
- If endorsements carried through friend feeds become a standard ad unit, control of personal and behavioral data — not creative or placement — becomes the central trust and regulation question for the advertising business.
- Media economics tilt further toward platforms that own the distribution graph over publishers that own the content, with audience attention routed through proprietary feeds.
The trend: Advertising is migrating from publisher-placed messages to endorsements distributed through platform-owned social graphs, turning each network's member data into the inventory itself.