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"Clearly, the vast majority of businesses that use Facebook for marketing are pleased with the experience. Facebook's growing revenues, up 63% last quarter, indicate it is only getting more successful at selling advertising, not less."

Clearly? Just because they're getting better at selling doesn't mean the people are actually pleased with the experience. And as this article points out, "selling" is the same as "collecting payment".

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I guess I wouldn't go all the way to "clearly," but if a line of business in a highly visible market is growing, that often indicates that the product it is selling is useful. The buyers are motivated and have the capability to test the product's efficacy. It would be quite a thing if Facebook ads generally did not work and somehow Facebook was successfully growing the ad business anyway.

It all depends whether their customers are repeat advertisers or not. If they're able to continue growing their first-time advertisers, but few of these businesses are satisfied, repeat advertisers - then I wouldn't say "clearly" is appropriate.

AKA: The Groupon Effect

Or we just discovered how useless the marketing metrics for a large number of companies can be. Probably a couple product ideas in this problem...

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