We have read about the wave that is crashing through the media landscape. As Henry Jenkins asserts in his book "Convergence Culture" that the hardware is diverging but the content is converging. More and more, our devices are able to do the same things. Media itself has also taken this route of multimedia convergence. Social networking sites like Facebook are a perfect example of this. You can post videos, links, text, pictures, and even play games. These sites are insanely popular with Facebook having more than 400 million members. But despite this popularity, these sites have not found a way to be profitable as their advertising methods struggle.
When you log onto your Facebook account, there is constantly a column of ads on the right side of your screen. Over the past few years I have noticed that these ads have become increasingly more targeted. Multiple ads target me specifically for my music taste, interest in rock climbing, and for my age. While these ads do get my attention, they leave me with an uneasy feeling. Almost as if Facebook knows too much about me and that they are able to sell that information to other companies. Other ads seem so off topic and bizarre that I am turned off by them at the very beginning. According to a recent New York Times article, advertisers strive so hard to make their ads eye-popping and relevant that they end up making the ads too well targeted, thus turning off the potential customer. The vice president of business development at Facebook, Dan Rose, predicted that the quality of the ads on the site will improve as time passes and more business get involved.
People are incredibly susceptible to advertising. But people don't like to be aware that they are so susceptible nor do they like it when advertisers try to hard to target them. The immense amount of information on Facebook has been taken advantage of by advertisers. But ads struggle to find a balance between being too specific and too off color. Maybe the quality of these advertisements will change, but until then companies will struggle to turn Facebook into a revenue machine.
Works Cited:
The New York Times "Ads Posted on Facebook Strike Some as Off-Key"
Henry Jenkins "Convergence Culture"
Class Discussions
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