Facebook

I'm not an uncritical fan of Facebook but I do quite enjoy using the service, from time to time. There are weaknesses, problems and difficulties with all websites and there are quite a few things I don't like about Facebook's site but my main complaint is that I don't like being the product; I prefer to be the customer.

What do I mean by this? In common with many other 'free' web services (Twitter, Hotmail and Gmail, for example, all of which I use regularly), Facebook generates the revenue to cover their costs by displaying adverts to their users.

The nature of the adverts varies between the different services but the basic plan is the same; gather your users' personal information and show than adverts chosen, at least in part, by reviewing that data and making predictions about their habits. You are, in effect, sold to advertisers so that they may exhibit their wares to you.

The advantage for the advertiser is that this sort of customer profiling (which happens even if the only information the advertiser has is your approximate location) allows them to target their adverts at the people most likely to be interested in their services (it's a bit more complicated than this in real life but you get the idea). This reduces their costs (showing adverts costs money) and improves their hit rates (people are more likely to click through adverts showing things they actually want).

The advantage to the service user, apart from not laying out cash to use the service, is that they are more likely to see adverts which that might be of interest to them. Nobody wants to be spammed with adverts for products they're unlikely to buy but carefully targeted ads can sometimes be useful.

If targeted ads can be useful and if they allow a service to be provided without charge to the end user you might ask what I'm complaining about. Essentially, service quality and privacy, neither of which the providers of free services are incentivised to offer beyond the minimum required to attract or retain users. Facebook's business plan relies on gathering as much private data from users as possible so that their advertisers can more tightly target their ads. They're basically selling you and your data to the advertisers.

This is fine if you're happy to share your data, accept the loss of privacy and have your page cluttered with adverts. I'm not happy to do this any more. I want to pay for Facebook's service, which I enjoy using, so that I see pages without adverts and to incentivise Facebook to look after my interests and data.

I don't expect this to happen any time soon because the people most likely to pay to use the service are probably the most valuable users to advertisers and Facebook won't want to risk advertising revenue just to offer an improved service to a minority of customers. Maybe this is an opportunity for someone else to make a splash?