Facebook's Get-Rich-Quick Scheme Has Yankees Player Sliding Into Home
Facebook's revenues are reportedly up 70 percent from last year, when they came in between $250 million and $300 million. What's their magic trick? Junky ads with catchy photos!
Most of Facebook's surge in user numbers — they're now past 200 million — has come overseas, where it's hard for Facebook to sell ads. Earlier this year, executived decided to loosen up restrictions on the kind of ads that could be placed on their system. (A side benefit: Less money spent paying recent college graduates to review ads manually.)
Now there's a plethora of diet ads, IQ quizzes, and other cheap come-ons that populate the Web's lowest-rent advertising inventory.
Plus some really amusing stuff, like this homoerotic solicitation for Yankees fans and a six-pack-abs ad featuring Edward Norton as a neo-Nazi from American History X.