Facebook says that "all content should be as engaging as the posts you see from friends and family." But how does the company square that with the sly offering of the opportunity to override the irrelevance or poor quality of a post with dollar bills?
I think Ars Technica is conflating reputation and quality with audience size. Number of Likes and Fans corresponds to 1 to 5 star ratings on Amazon—a measure of quality and reputation; Subscriptions (a relatively new Facebook feature) correspond to voluntary signups to a newsletter. Growth in the former doesn't—shouldn't—have anything to do with the later.
You don't buy away the problem of irrelevance or quality: the measure of that on Facebook is obvious. Lots of Likes = High Quality.
You are just buying a bigger audience. The ads are like buying more Subscriptions, targeted to people who are likely to Subscribe to your content anyway.
Dangerous Minds wrote about how it rose from 29,000 to 53,000 Facebook likes even as traffic to its site from shared Facebook posts went down by one half to two-thirds in the same time period.
Dangerous Minds doesn't get it. Just because you're high quality doesn't mean you automatically have a huge audience!
I think this is the right move for Facebook from a design point of view. Likes aren't Shares aren't Subscriptions. Separating the audience measure from the quality measure helps everyone get better information out of these numbers.
I think Ars Technica is conflating reputation and quality with audience size. Number of Likes and Fans corresponds to 1 to 5 star ratings on Amazon—a measure of quality and reputation; Subscriptions (a relatively new Facebook feature) correspond to voluntary signups to a newsletter. Growth in the former doesn't—shouldn't—have anything to do with the later.
You don't buy away the problem of irrelevance or quality: the measure of that on Facebook is obvious. Lots of Likes = High Quality.
You are just buying a bigger audience. The ads are like buying more Subscriptions, targeted to people who are likely to Subscribe to your content anyway.
Dangerous Minds wrote about how it rose from 29,000 to 53,000 Facebook likes even as traffic to its site from shared Facebook posts went down by one half to two-thirds in the same time period.
Dangerous Minds doesn't get it. Just because you're high quality doesn't mean you automatically have a huge audience!
I think this is the right move for Facebook from a design point of view. Likes aren't Shares aren't Subscriptions. Separating the audience measure from the quality measure helps everyone get better information out of these numbers.