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“How Much Do You Open the Kimono: Does “Thought Leadership” Cannibalize Your Ability to Monetize What You Know?”

hey create content for the (estimated by Eloqua) 85% of the market that doesn’t know who they are, instead of the 15% that do. This is a key finding, as most content is targeted to mid and late funnel thinking and objection overcoming, rather than top of the funnel awareness building. To that end, Eloqua often invests in content that’s not particularly related to their actual business.

Brands may not adopt Facebook's new ad media in large numbers: It seems unlikely, but it is possible that marketers are just not prepared for the dynamic new ad model Facebook has unveiled.

FTC pushes for much more obvious disclosure of sponsored ads in users' newsfeeds: Allowing marketers to turn their posts into ads within the newsfeed is not new--Twitter is already doing the same thing with Promoted Tweets--but is the fact these are paid ads obvious enough to users? The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a longstanding standard that people must recognize ads as such and cannot be duped into thinking advertising is content.

"MySpace felt a lot of pressure to monetize quickly after it was sold to News Corp. And I think as result, they added advertising, they added things we might consider to be spammy, things users found intrusive."

By reacting to what’s top of mind for users, Facebook could unlock new utility, entertainment, and monetization potential. The cards test is rolling out to a small subset of iOS users.

Facebook could reduce the after-sharing bounce rate with its new cards.

The cards could endear businesses to Facebook by giving them an extra chance to connect with people who’ve shown they’re interested. If you see photos of friends having a great time at a restaurant after you check in there, the social proof will probably leave you with a more positive perception of the place.

Pinterest’s roadmap to monetization is becoming more clear. The company announced today that its Promoted Pins program, which it made available in beta to certain brands eight months ago, has performed “just as good and sometimes better than organic Pins,” and it will make the program available to all advertisers on January 1.

MoPub offers a comprehensive platform that monetizes ad space on mobile platforms and social media, while providing real-time bidding for prime advertising slots and times. In 2013, the company was purchased by Twitter for $350 millio

Despite the silence from Facebook on the matter, the company has made moves in the past that would indicate at least a desire to further its reach in the mobile advertising market. Last year, Facebook released Audience Network, which is meant to build out its infrastructure and enable advertisers to run Facebook ads on third-party mobile phones. Another such program is Atlas, which tracks users anonymously and provides feedback to advertisers. Facebook has also taken out a patent on a program that would enable advertisers to target only the most “influential” people on social media. Theoretically, these programs would be stitched together as part of any MoPub-like system.

By 2014, “Facebook the big news machine” was in full swing with Trending, hashtags and news outlets pouring resources into growing their Pages. Emphasizing the “news” in News Feed retrained users to wait for the big world-changing headlines to come to them rather than crisscrossing the home pages of various publishers. Many don’t even click-through, getting the gist of the news just from the headline and preview blurb. Advertisers followed the eyeballs, moving their spend from the publisher sites to Facebook.

In 2015, Facebook realized users hated waiting for slow mobile websites to load, so it launched Instant Articles to host publisher content within its own app. Instant Articles trained users not to even visit news sites when they clicked their links, instead only having the patience for a fast-loading native page stripped of the publisher’s identity and many of their recirculation and monetization opportunities. Advertisers followed, as publishers allowed Facebook to sell the ads on Instant Articles for them and thereby surrendered their advertiser relationships at the same time as their reader relationships.

This is how Facebook turns publishers into ghostwriters, a problem I blew the whistle on in 2015. Publishers are pitted against each other as they make interchangeable “dumb content” for Facebook’s “smart pipes.”