Here's the thing: I hate ads. All forms of ads.

The reason I hate ads is that 99% of the time are interrupting me and telling me about things I do not want to know about. If I am chatting with a friend on Facebook, there's no way any kind of ad is going to do anything but get in my way. If, however, I am actually looking to solve a problem, I go to a search engine and start bringing up web pages. In this scenario I am actively seeking something -- perhaps something an ad might be able to help with.

So content ads on informative sites and as part of search seems to me like a lesser evil of all ads. I have a few sites and ideally I'd like to remove all Adsense from my site and replace it with links to stuff people want. The problem is that there's such a long-tail phenomenon going on when people go looking for stuff. For instance, if I have a informative site on dinosaurs I know people coming there via a search engine want to know more about dinosaurs. But would they like a book? A museum trip? Tickets to a dinosaur movie? A college education in paleontology? The answer is yes: some of them would like all of that stuff. And even more. The only way that I know how to assist these people is somehow rotating ads that solve a large variety of problems. Ideally you'd use some kind of machine learning to gather what you can and continue to optimize. Google does this for me, so while I hate ads, providing people with a _little_ bit of randomized assistance from a large catalog of options in a location where they are already looking for stuff seems like a pretty good deal for both the reader and me.

In social media you are no longer trying to respond to a searching reader. Instead you have readers that are doing other things that you are trying to interrupt. Perhaps using their friends as interruptions might work. Perhaps if you only interrupt by providing material related to what they are already doing. But no matter how you hack it, as a social media advertiser your game is to take a reader that is doing one thing and get them doing something else. We've gone from ad-supported radio and television, where listening to the ads were a form of saying "thank you" to the advertiser for providing the material, to a place where advertisers are using technology to try to pry into and control every part of our lives. And yes, it's because of everybody wanting things for free. This is not a happy symbiotic relationship anymore.

ADD: In fact, it's mind-boggling if you think about it. Facebook is trying to take a billion people and make them do things they would not normally do. Yes, people waste their time anyway, but not everybody, not all the time. Wonder how much lost productivity are they creating? How many man-years? How many people making purchases for things they never wanted? How many people playing games with imaginary farms and such for hundreds or thousands of hours? People said the television had an on-off switch, and so does the net. But people are social animals, and the net is the way we communicate. If all of your friends and family are on Facebook, you're going to want to know what they are doing. Facebook uses your friendships against you in order to purposely divert you from things you'd normally do so that you'll spend all of your time on their site playing, gossiping, and purchasing. Ouch. Doesn't sound like an imminent failure. Sounds like a new form of crack. If that much social damage were done by a drug, it would have easily been outlawed by now.