Facebook, Twitter and the economics of attention

Some wonder whether Facebook will ever be able to make advertising work at all, because of the nature of the network and the purposes for which most people use it — and whether alternative networks like Twitter aren’t better equipped to do so.

One of the more recent discussions of that idea comes from startup advisor and entrepreneur Alistair Croll, who argues in a recent blog post that despite its enormous size and reach — something that should theoretically make it perfectly suited for advertising — the nature of Facebook’s network actually makes it less effective at doing this than Twitter. In a nutshell, Croll says, we are more likely to be open to commercial messages appearing in our Twitter stream because the network is asymmetric (meaning you don’t have to approve every follower, and users can send you messages by simply using your Twitter name). Facebook, by contrast, is based on a more symmetric model — one that is designed to allow users to control their social network at a very granular level, by approving each and every “friend,” and therefore implicitly accepting that messages from them will appear in their timeline. The network has added subscriptions and other features to try and duplicate the asymmetric model that Twitter uses, but those don’t seem to have really taken off for most users, many of whom complain about subscriber spam. And that kind of structure, Croll argues, makes it a particularly ineffective medium for advertising. (July 5)