Fix your Facebook privacy settings!
January 24th, 2010
Pretty much everyone uses social networks of one kind or another – a Bank of America analyst post indicates that in December 81% of the US internet population visited a social networking site. There are a lot of choices out there – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, to name a few. For a photographer, they’ve become an essential tool to market your services and build your brand.
So what’s the fly in the ointment? Social networks need to make money. So who pays for all those servers and hard drives spinning in a data warehouse in Utah, Eastern Washington, or whereever? Right now the answer is no one – they’re all losing money at an astonishing clip, funded by incremental investment and huge valuations that right now feel to me more like the internet bubble of a decade ago than anything real.
The user base of social networks is huge and growing fast, and the belief is that more eyeballs means more revenue. That’s how Google makes so much money. Yes and no – it’s only true if the site has an effective way to monetize the user. There are a couple of ways to do this and serving ads is the big one. But as important as the number of users a site has is what the industry calls click-through rate (CTR) and cost-per-thousand (CPM) – essentially these numbers report how often a user actually clicks on an ad. Right now, for most social networks, these important numbers are abysmally low. A couple of days ago a report came out indicating that Facebook’s CTR is 0.038% and average CPM is$0.23. These numbers are, to put it bluntly, terrible – average CTR is not a meaningful metric (there’s simply too much variation in types of campaigns, targeting, and customers to make it a real stat) but 0.038% is very poor.
To address this, they’re all juggling the ad model and trying to get better at delivering ads to users. So here’s the rub – in order to do that, they need your information, so they can serve up targeted ads that are relevant to your interests, so that you’ll click on them. This has turned into an interesting debate on privacy, and as much as I like Facebook, I think that as of the December update in FB’s privacy policy they’re over the line in what personal data they’re started mining and publishing. Did you know for example, that if you accepted the new default FB privacy settings, your status update “headed to Central America for 2 weeks, yay!” is visible to everyone, not just your friends? Do you really want the world to know that your house will be empty for the next 2 weeks?
But there is a way to fix it, and the NY Times posted a great article a couple of days ago on what settings you may want to change in order to manage the amount of information that you share. I highly recommend you take a look at it – the link is here.
