But you probably don't represent the average Facebook user. Most of my non-tech friends share everything - FB knows pretty much everything about them, and certainly for some of the younger ones, FB has become their primary communication platform.

For most of them, paying with Facebook would just be easier than using something else / remembering more details etc etc. And they probably trust FB more than they trust other companies with far less visibility (although most them have used their CC without any thought or concern on a load of different websites).

FWIW and personally, I completely echo your thoughts - although I'm sure I'd end up giving my CC details to FB as soon as a website that I needed to buy from offered no other method to pay than the FB one.

>I've been on FB since the beginning. And I've never clicked on an ad. What makes you think I will to actually buy something?

I'll offer a counter anecdote. I've been impressed by their targeted ads more than once and clicked!

It has to get hyper-specific though. Not like gender-targeting, for me it read that I liked linguistics at one point in my profile and offered me an add to by a Wug shirt. I was super impressed and spent time in their online store.

I've never clicked on a Facebook ad either, but I've run ads on Facebook and they got clicked a lot. The cost per new user was lower than Google Adwords.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to dismiss Facebook's chances at making money from ads yet. I've never clicked on a TV ad either, but stations make hundreds of billions of dollars from those ads every year. That industry took many decades to grow to that point though.

It's not whether Facebook makes money off the ads. We know they do. It's whether the advertisers make money from the ads that will demonstrate if there is a sustainable business model there.

FB allows you to buy gift cards from stores for credits, so for an outlier that doesn't trust Facebook with cc details, there's another option. Through buying Karma, they can bring gift giving into Facebook credits, so for someone's birthday you can buy a gift card through Facebook, and you can take your phone to the store and use your gift. This has tons of potential and you can for even more through Facebook. Think of buying tickets for events, or going to a small business' store and buying an item (Etsy style). Or Etsy, Amazon, eBay, etc setting up apps where you can use Facebook credits to buy (long term). I have two cousins visiting from India, and it's amazing watching them use Facebook. They're constantly on. Using it to connect with friends, play games, etc. This is a whole market the most people don't think of. These markets are huge. And as another user pointed out, all these kids using Facebook these days are growing up with it and will continue to use it, and trust it. It's a whole different experience that we don't really see.

I'm definitely not gonna trust FB with credit card or anything private. It is a company built on sharing, with repeated history of privacy issues. It's one thing posting there about my vacation and what I think of latest Hollywood blockbuster and quite another to give them a line to my bank account. For the latter I would rather have some company that has better privacy traditions.

Precisely. The ethos of the Facebook notion of sharing and privacy is antithetical to what a financial service needs to have.

One big reason I trust Paypal for everyday transactions is because they make money off of each transaction directly, whether through direct fees or merchant fees. I can understand their business model, and the service has a certain simplicity.

The OP wants me to give financial data to a company where my data is their product, and who is always trying to prise more "openness" from me through a byzantine privacy UI and borderline surreptitious app installations? I'll pass, thanks.

You seem to conflate [1 - what I want FB to do with regards to privacy] with [2 - what FB needs to do so I trust they won't steal my money]. The two have nothing to do with each other.

Realistically speaking, 1 may never happen, 2 is already there (even if you're only liable for $50 from unauthorized cc transactions).

What if what I spend my money on is private? I don't really want my spending habits to be social.

3. What facebook needs to do so I trust that other people can't steal my money through facebook.

If you're entering a CC then it's not your money that's on the hook.

You might not trust FB with your CC info but elderly/non tech savy people will. Remember, there is less of us and more of them. Point is to capture a bigger market, which clearly trusts FB with their most intimate details then why not CC?

>I've been on FB since the beginning. And I've never clicked on an ad. What makes you think I will to actually buy something?

FB has several billions of revenue from ads.

What makes you think you are not an insignificant outlier and that this move or any other doesn't concern you?

Just think people, if everybody did what I do on FB, would FB still exist? If the answer is no, then what you might or might not do, doesn't matter with regards to FB.

Despite the fact that FB makes money off of ads, do you think people would prefer to have ads on Facebook, or to not have ads?

I think the answer is obvious: people prefer no ads. "Advertisement" is a dirty word. People want a free, ad-less product, despite the fact that it's economically unfeasible.

That's a problem. What happens when it becomes more widespread or easier to install things like adblock? What happens if a browser comes along that blocks Facebook cookies and ads by default, but still allows the basic functionality of FB? Don't say it can't happen. We're just getting to the point in society where having everything about us on someone's server is "normal". Wait until there's a disaster of some sort, a major security breach, and see how fast people change their habits. It can happen overnight.

>I think the answer is obvious: people prefer no ads. "Advertisement" is a dirty word. People want a free, ad-less product, despite the fact that it's economically unfeasible.

Well, the answer might be obvious but might not mean much. For example a similar question would be "people prefer to pay for things, or get them for free?". I think the answer would be obvious here too.

>That's a problem. What happens when it becomes more widespread or easier to install things like adblock? What happens if a browser comes along that blocks Facebook cookies and ads by default, but still allows the basic functionality of FB? Don't say it can't happen.

Then the Ad industry will turn RIAA on the users, and will lobby the government for the disallowance of things like AdBlock ("our content is a package deal, you cannot see it, and thus benefit from it, without also seeing our ads").

And it might be successful too, because they will have the support of ALL other industries -- as ads are a crucial element of over-consumption on which they thrive. By leaving it to our "needs" and "wants" only, consumption would drop very low (IIRC, they have studied the effects of a prolonged (a week?) mass media strike during the seventies, and that was the result. That was short term though, long-term should be even worse).

Most people don't click on ads, but the minority that do can generate billions of dollars of revenue. The minority that do follow the ones that don't.

A recent report showed that the minority that click ads at facebook is pretty close to half. Not a bad minority to have using your site.

If you're talking about the report that batista referenced - I haven't seen it. 50% never clicking on an ad even once suggests that ad clickers are still a pretty extreme minority.

I'm pretty sure that I could have been counted as a clicker in that study - I'm sure I accidentally clicked on an ad at least once when I was on facebook.

Could you please provide a link to the report? 50% click rate is insanely high, nobody has that. It would be very interesting to know how Facebook achieved such miraculous performance.

>Could you please provide a link to the report? 50% click rate is insanely high, nobody has that. It would be very interesting to know how Facebook achieved such miraculous performance.

He is not talking about 50% click rate.

That is, he's not talking about 1 ad.

He says that 50% of FB users have clicked on ads at some point in their FB use.

Which might, or might not be true, but is not the same as "50% click rate".

Oh, you mean 50% of people that ever opened facebook have clicked on some ad at least once? Then it's not a very useful number - so suppose I clicked on some ad 5 years ago and since then never even logged in to FB - what use is to count that? I'd assume a useful number would be the number of active users regularly clicking on ads... IMHO 50% would be very high number then (unless you define regularly as "at least once in 5 years" :)

Yeah, I'm sure I accidentally clicked on a few ads in the days before I deactivated my account. So put me in that minority.