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Comment by jrwoodruff | Hacker News Reader

This is kind of amusing, in a way. It always seemed weird to me that large corporations were willing to invest so much in promoting Facebook - From CNN promoting it on every commercial to big brands creating departments to manage 'Social Media' - e.g. Facebook and Twitter.

Did they all think this was free advertising, forever? FB is (at least now) a publicly traded, 'walled garden' after all, and Twitter isn't much different.

Looks like the social media revenue model is becoming clear: All your customer are belong to us, pay up.

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Isn't the model always been clear: advertising?

You can run around in circles moaning about how it isn't "fair", but it isn't the Mark Cuban who built the infrastructure or attracted the users with a core product on Facebook. Secondly, Facebook never guaranteed 100% reach, I'm not sure why Mark Cuban expects it (and for free!).

I dunno, I think businesses realize that reach comes at a cost. In FB's case, however, they interpreted the cost as the time, effort, and resources that it takes to build a fanbase and pump out relevant, interesting content. Now they have to pay more to reach people who've voluntarily said, in essence, "I want to read/see your stuff." It feels a bit like a bait-and-switch.

To be fair, he asked in his post for cost certainty, not "free."

Now, honestly, what I want as a user and as an advertiser is the ability for the user to turn up and down the volume of another entity, be it a person or brand. I may want medium on George Takei, high on King's X and low on Hormel's Spam (yes, I like Spam.) Do you think it'd be valuable to send things to different demographics as a brand? I know I think so, especially if I can get some cost certainty.

The problem is that the amount of likes and the value of the brand are unrelated. Takei is not going to pay as much as Quizno's, even if he has three times the fans.

If I recall correctly, I think Facebook used to allow you to fine tune who you saw on your news feed. Not sure if it's still buried somewhere, gone, or what the uptake on this feature was.

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