Facebook Members Sell Their Own Ads
More than 1,500 Facebook users have started placing advertisements on their own profile pages-despite the social networking site's rule against such ads. — They are posting them with the help of a Montreal-based company called Weblo …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Weblo story lands in the middle of the worst stretch of Facebook's short advertising history. In November and December 2007 the company rolled out Beacon, its program for sharing members' web activity with friends, and drew mounting public criticism over privacy and PR handling — criticism Facebook itself acknowledged on December 5, admitting it had made many mistakes building and handling the feature.
Against that backdrop, more than 1,500 members are now doing an end-run around the site's business model entirely: placing advertisements on their own profile pages through Montreal-based Weblo, in direct violation of Facebook's rule against such ads. The timing matters because it tests who controls profile space — the platform that owns it or the users who populate it — while Facebook's credibility on ad decisions is already battered.
First-order effects
- Facebook must decide whether to enforce its rule against 1,500-plus paying members — mass takedowns right after the Beacon apology would deepen the perception, voiced in the December criticism, that the site's systems are not designed for users.
- Weblo gains a visible proof point for its model of letting people monetize virtual property and profile space, using Facebook's own audience as the demonstration.
Second-order effects
- If enforcement pushes these sellers off the platform, rivals courting disaffected Facebook users get an opening to permit member advertising as a differentiator; if Facebook tolerates it, its grip on its own ad inventory loosens.
- Advertisers gain a cheap channel into profile pages outside Facebook's sales apparatus, putting pressure on the pricing and placement control the platform's ad business depends on.
Third-order effects
- The clash previews the structural question every major social network eventually faces — whether user-generated pages are monetizable by members or exclusively by the host — pushing platforms toward sanctioned self-serve promotion tools as the compromise.
- Third-party intermediaries like Weblo position themselves as a distribution layer between users and platforms, a role that raises liability questions about which party answers for ads placed against a host's terms.
The trend: Social platforms are being forced to choose between policing exclusive control of ad inventory and building self-serve tools that let members monetize their own pages.