Close to Free

Now that Facebook is throttling traffic from Facebook fans to publishers to the extent that only about one in six or one in five publisher posts even gets shown to opted-in followers, publishers are losing their enthusiasm for the platform.

Facebook has a solution for this problem, though: publishers can spend money advertising to their opted-in members. While this seems crass - especially having come as it did just prior to Facebook's going-public-and-must-show-real-world-dollar-revenues period - the money spent communicating with this captured audience may be roughly as efficiently done as communicating to an in-house email list.

Facebook media can typically be had for pricing so low that the CPM is a poor metric. $0.24 CPMs are common. Compare that with a roughly $1 CPM cost of emailing and serving, Facebook may think itself competitive when it charges advertisers and publishers again for communicating to people who have already been "acquired" at considerable expense.

To the publishers, however, they may feel like they are the victim of a bait and switch, as when they invested significant internal resources in creating ornate Facebook pages and spending on acquisition advertising, they may have expected an explicit commitment from Facebook that those acquired members would be freely reachable.