Flipping Beacon
The chance that you’re interested in the same product / service at the same
time as a friend is really slim. More likely, you’ll get spammed with
irrelevant ads (business ads shown to friends in school, women’s clothing
ads shown to male friends, etc). It’s far more effective to target people
based on their own behavior than on the behavior of their friends.
Furthermore, it’s misleading to present an ad as an “endorsement” when the
friend hasn’t expressly promoted the product / service to their friends,
which discourages people from sharing their interest data all together.
What’s happening now on Facebook is people are opting out of the beacon
entirely because they don’t want to spam friends with these deceptive
“endorsements”. If Facebook flipped the model, people would be more willing
to share their activity streams and that data could be used to develop rich,
behavioral profiles for advertisers to target ads against.
Originally posted as a comment by Joe Lazarus on A VC using Disqus.
