Selling Ads On Facebook: Making A Buck Off The Man

After all the hullabaloo over Beacon and Facebook recently, it appears that several members of the popular social networking site have started to take ad placement on their pages into their own hands using Weblo. Weblo allows people to place ads on their social networking pages and generate revenue for themselves! While Facebook expressly forbids this type of action, many are saying that they are entitled to a portion of the revenue since the users are the contact creators.

I touched on this idea in my most recent post about Beacon. I tend to feel that if you want me to advertise for something, then I should see some benefit from said advertising, whether it be straight up cash or some other intangible benefit. On the other hand, I did not necessarily create the infrastructure and put up none of the costs associated with the site, so who am I to demand revenue?

It is an interesting proposition. If I create the content that keeps users coming back to Myspace, allowing them to generate revenue, should I not be entitled to a piece of that revenue pie? Or does it all belong to Myspace, since I would not have a place to build such a page without them? This also harkens back to the video sharing sites debates, where You Tube content creators began to ask for revenue. Some video sharing sites began to offer various levels of compensation for content, and all to various degrees of success.

Initially, I was going to sign up for Weblo, mainly to do some research for this post. After perusing their site, however, I decided against it. Not only do they in particular look shady, but the "revenue" that showed their members making was laughable. It seemed to me that yet again, an advertising group was attempting to get me to advertise for them for nothing while they raked in the money. I'll say it again, I don't mind advertising for a product I believe in, but at the end of the day I want to see some personal benefit for it.

If you have any experience with Weblo or any other service like it, sound off here in the comments. Personally, I want to explore this idea a bit more to see if it's legit.

Facebook members sell their own ads [NY Times]