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.