Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch did a review today of a new ad service from Ads-Click called MicroSocialAds, where users on platforms like Facebook and MSN Messenger will be able to target ads to their friends and will be paid 80% of the ad’s price.

The text ads in Facebook, for example, would make up fewer than 35 characters and would be highly targeted. Users would have the option to opt-out if they wish– so Ads-Click isn’t making the same initial mistake Facebook made with Beacon.

However, as Schonfeld brought up, this may be a violation of Facebook’s rules of the road, which prohibit “any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, solicitations, promotional materials, “junk mail,” “spam,” “chain letters,” “pyramid schemes,” or any other form of solicitation.”

On the other hand, why does Facebook receive so much traffic? It is because of its users. It makes sense that users whose profiles get more hits than others should have a shot to make some profit off of that, rather than letting Facebook reap the benefits of somebody else’s popularity.

If Facebook does choose to block MicroSocialAds, how will that go over? The idea that monetizing one’s own profile is wrong, but Facebook can put all the ads it wants up there without compensating the person that attracted users to those ads, is worth considering. Then again, Facebook does provide the platform, and it doesn’t just create itself.

We’ll revisit this experiment later on.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 12:58 pmand is filed under Business, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.