Facebook is beginning the process of paying Facebook users to watch ads. You watch the ad and you get paid. Sounds simple. But this new thrust could bring disastrous results to the Internet.
We have seen a lot of change from Facebook over time. Some of it has been good and some we have had to grin and bear it. This latest deal with paying Facebook users for viewing ads just seems so wrong.
Here are my thoughts on why I see this is not a good idea:
- You are training users to get paid for something that they should be doing for free anyways. This will start on Facebook and migrate off to other parts of the web. Imagine businesses having to pay users to view their ads off of Facebook because it has now become an expected process. Or how about, “Pay me and I will visit your website”.
- People will milk the process: they will just click and leave to go to the next ad. This promotes abuse. If it can make money, people will do it; and do it lots of times. Will these people go through the sales funnel? Probably not. I don’t thing they will when there is money to be made by going onto another paying ad.
- Some how business is going to be left holding the cheque/check. Yet another tax on small business especially. Someone has to pay for the money going out to the “Clickers”.
- This method bypasses the process on connecting and building relationships. It takes time to build a good connection. This click and get paid process will not foster connection. Remember that customers do business with businesses they “Like”. When people are off to the next click, it’s hard to get anything good happening.
Real worthwhile business these days focuses on building connections with customers. It works better with smaller businesses than bigger one. But big business has to proceed in this direction as well.
The problem comes when business tries to shortcut the process; maximum gain with minimum effort. Social media has brought a paradigm shift. Now business needs to put an effort into building customer relationships.
I see this latest effort from Facebook as a means to appease big business. Big business wants to throw a lot of money at customers to get the job done. This does not work for small business. And by the way, small business makes up the biggest part of business in our economy.
But maybe I am wrong. Maybe I should quit what I am doing and focus on how many ads I can click in 1 hour. I bet I could click 1000 ads in 1 hour. At $0.10 per ad, that could give me a wage of $100.00 per hour. I could hire people to do this. This might be brilliant 🙂
After all, we are not talking Sears here. We are talking Facebook with a potential of 650 million users by the end of the year. Facebook is training up a generation. What will they train them to do? I think small business really needs to chime in on this one to make sure it does not go south. I am not against Facebook. But this idea can lead to a new trend that could drastically change the face of how business is done.
Please let me know your thoughts.
There have been attempts to do this before. People have made 1 cent to view 30 seconds of advertising. One guy told me it took a long time to make $20.00. But this is Facebook doing it. This has greater visibility and more money being thrown out: 10 cents. Business will be eventually flipping the bill for this. I wonder who really will be doing all the ad watching? Will they even be interested in buying?
One of my Facebook connections wrote this:
” I’ve been getting paid to view ads for years. Not very lucrative at 1 cent for a 30 second viewing. I’ll be looking into this if they are paying 10 cents. Is it any different than purchasing keywords from Google. If there was a way for me to get the $2-5 they charge for some keywords I’d visit their sites. I’d even stay a couple minutes. It would only be Facebook getting rich, using the stupid poor people like myself to bleed business’s for money!”