«IT'S CALLED GOSSIP AND OF COURSE AND IT'S AN OBSESSION OF MINE»- ANDY WARHOL

«There are already tons of reasons to be skeptical about hopes for mingling the intense sociality of the web with an interloper like an advertisement. In its fourth-quarter results, Google noted the difficulty MySpace, with whom it has an ad arrangement, has in monetizing its immense traffic. Before that, Facebook, the fast-growing No. 2 player, lost momentum when its plan to turn user recommendations of products and services into ad inventory ran smack into a wall of privacy complaints. While users might be eager to talk about brands and products, as Facebook has maintained, they don't necessarily want to do so with some drooling corporation looking over their shoulders and broadcasting their recommendations to the world in sponsored boxes. The difficulty begs several important questions, among them whether all this is just an attempt to make money off the unmonetizable? »

-Adage
March 17 2008