Mark Cuban: Facebook Is Driving Away Brands — Starting With Mine 299
concealment sends this quote from an article at ReadWriteWeb:
"Tech billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says he is fed up with Facebook and will take his business elsewhere. He's sick of getting hit with huge fees to send messages to his team's fans and followers. Two weeks ago Cuban tweeted out a screen grab of an offer he'd received from Facebook. The social network wanted to charge him $3,000 to reach 1 million people. Along with the screen grab, Cuban wrote, 'FB is blowing it? This is the first step. The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or to new MySpace as primary site.'"
Re:I think something is missing here... (Score:3, Informative)
Forgive me if I'm incorrect here... But Facebook isn't trying to charge him to post on his page with 1 million fans; Facebook is trying to charge him for "promoting" [read: advertising] his post more prominently in peoples timelines and around the site.
I don't have a problem with this. You let Facebook's news feed dynamic work for free just like everyone else, your you pay up to reach others. Why is he pitching such a hissy fit over advertising not being free?
Facebook are now charging you to get access to your own fans per post, this is not extra advertising. Whenever you post something on facebook only a small subset will get your content injected into their news feed unless you cough up the extra money so that more/all of them see it.
This is something they only added a few months ago. They want to charge this every time you post as well.
So I don't blame him for getting a bit upset at least here as this is something that facebook have taken away e.g. it was free and now they charge for it. To be fair though, they never gave you 100% coverage of your posts into fans feeds before, but now it's a really low "free" coverage and you have to pay to get the vast majority of people who are already following you to see your content.
Re:That is cheap (Score:4, Informative)
The first; that this is a bait and switch operation,
No it's not. A bait-and-switch is advertising a product for some price and then when a customer comes you tell them the product is not available and you attempt to sell them something else. Changing a free service to being partially paid-for is not a bait-and-switch.
Re:That is cheap (Score:4, Informative)
No contract is involved (just terms of use), but Facebook has indeed made the promise that its service "is free and always will be."
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2011/09/facebook-will-always-be-free-company-says/ [go.com]
Re:That is cheap (Score:5, Informative)