The social networking web site, Facebook, has been increasing in popularity over the past year one. The concept of Facebook, like all so-called social networking sites, is to attract users that provide content to the site. The site owners then profit from this enormous input of user generated content as the site becomes more and more popular.
But lately, users of social networking sites such as Facebook are demanding to get paid for their participation. The latest example of this comes courtesy of the Canadian-based advertising network, Weblo, which empowers Facebook users to sell ads on their profile pages via an easy-to-use advertising application, or “ad widget.”
So far, more than 1500 members of Facebook have placed advertisements from the Weblo network on their profile pages. The problem? Advertising on user profiles is in direct violation of Facebookâs terms of service.
So far, Facebook has taken no action to curtail users selling ads on their profile pages, and with good reason: many of the users incorporating ads into their profiles are extremely popular, and attract a great deal of attention to Facebook by their participation. In other words, by alienating their most popular members, Facebook could be cutting off its nose to spite his face.
As a result, Facebook is walking a fine line between enforcing their stated terms of service, and keeping their users from jumping ship to join another social networking site such as MySpace, to name one example.
But many people think that users of social networking sites have every right to sell ad space on their profile pages. At the end of the day, the sites would have no content — and thus, no profit — without the contributions of their users. Therefore it makes sense that if users are responsible for the site’s success, they should also be able to make a few bucks off of their participation.
But this logic worries many social networking web sites, not just Facebook. MySpace and YouTube are two other wildly popular sites that are entirely dependent upon the contributions of their users. If those same users began demanding a piece of the action for their participation on the site, the Web could quickly wind up as one giant billboard (some say it already is!).
More and more, the question of user generated content, and how it should be compensated (if at all) is becoming an issue online. How Facebook handles its current situation will likely have far-reaching consequences throughout the Web, especially for mega-popular social networking sites like YouTube and MySpace.
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