Idea for Monetizing Facebook

Okay if you don't know much about how the business of running a website works, here's a quick crash course:

You make a site that (presumably) gives people something they want. Whether it's information (PokerTips.org), entertainment (YouTube), or a medium through which to connect to their friends (Facebook), the idea is the same in each situation: get a bunch of people to come to your site where you can expose them to advertisements that you make money off of.

This is why almost all successful sites have advertisements (and why this blog doesn't). Now, some sites make more money per visitor than other sites. In some cases, they make wayyyyy more money. It all depends on the quality of traffic.

Take PokerTips for instance. PokerTips' traffic is worth quite a lot compared to most other websites. People find PokerTips by searching for "poker strategy" or "poker advice". They are looking for is something very precise: poker information. And not only is poker information precise, it is also very profitable. I don't think you need to know much about online poker to know that those rooms make a lot of money, and therefore are willing to pay a nice premium to sites who refer them customers. So as you can see, a visitor to PokerTips is pretty valuable since online poker rooms pay affiliates a lot for sending them a player.

Facebook's traffic is basically the antithesis of "high value traffic". Most of their visits are from returning visitors (which are worth a lot less than new visitors). The visitors are there for a very vague reason (and thus hard to convert into buying specific products or services). And most importantly, the visitors are completely worthless and usually poor (teenagers and college kids whose time is worth next to nothing).

So Facebook has a big problem. Sure, they get a ton of traffic... but all of that traffic is virtually worthless!

Since Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, turned down an offer a year or so ago to sell the site for $1B, he clearly thinks that the site is worth a lot. The problem the Facebook team is facing is: how do they monetize their site to make all that traffic actually worth something?

Here is an idea I had that could help their situation:

Force users to watch a 30 second commercial anytime they click on a thumbnail of one of their female friends on the beach.

You might be thinking, "oh wah wah wah, people are going to leave the site if you make them sit through a commercial."

But why shouldn't you be forced to watch commercials on Facebook?

• You turn on a TV... you get a batch of content interrupted every few minutes by commericals.


• You pick up a magazine... you get pages of content divided by full-page advertisements.


• You go see a movie... you're subjected to ten minutes of previews (and depending on the theater, minutes of Coca-Cola and refreshment advertisements too) before your movie begins.

Big, giant advertisements are everywhere you go... so why shouldn't they be on Facebook too?

And what makes my idea great is that you're putting them right before something people are so willing to look at that they'll actually sit through your advertisement rather than flee the site: young girls in bikinis.

What makes this so great for Facebook is also what helped make Joe Francis so rich: the content is complete free! Hoards of college girls post pictures of themselves wearing their bikini at the beach every day! And everytime I become new friends with a cute girl, I immediately go to her photos and scroll through until I inevitably stumble upon her default bikini photo. There has never been an instance where I wanted to see a girl's bikini photo and yet she hadn't uploaded one. They all upload one. Just like getting drunk at a frat party, or majoring in something worthless... it's standard college girl behavior.

And I can tell you that almost all guys look at their female Facebook friends' bikini photos. It's natural male curiosity. "Hmm... I wonder what [dumb blonde college girl] looks like at the beach... let's find out!"

So why shouldn't Facebook subject me to an ad before showing me the bikini photo? I mean... I already spent four minutes scrolling through page after page of pictures of her making a slutty pose with her girlfriends at the club, kissing some random douchebag on the cheek, and standing next to the local monuments around wherever Daddy sent her on study abroad all so I could get to the pictures of her in a bikini! Certainly I'm not about to turn around after making it this far all because of some silly 30 second commercial!

This would be so easy for Facebook to implement too. When girls upload photos to their Facebook, there's a little box they check when it's a "Bikini Photo". Then you pay someone in China twenty cents an hour to go through and verify that it is, indeed, a bikini photo. Pictures that have been tagged as bikini photos are accompanied by a short commercial for anyone who clicks on them.

You can give the girls... I dunno... maybe a little star by their profile if they tag a bikini photo of themselves. Or glitter. College girls definitely like stars and glitter I think. Or maybe that's strippers... I dunno the line gets blurrier every day.

Either way, here's your flow chart on how to get photos tagged as bikini photos:



C'mon Facebook... if you really think your site is worth billions... get your act together and start exposing me to commercials before letting me see the only worthwhile content on your site!

My cut is a very reasonable 10% of revenues made off of commercials shown before bikini photos. Email me and we'll set up a direct deposit.