As a general rule, I hate advertising. As a “Marketer” (or at least a phenomenologist being paid by Marketing) this is why I chose to work at a Communications agency not an Advertising agency.

Six years ago when I started in this space, PyroMarketing, Creating Customer Evangelists and Life After the 30-Second Spot. The “New Media” revolution was about the people, about connecting with people not spamming people with unwanted advertising.

I’m not saying all advertising is bad. It has a place, some of it I really enjoy. And I’m sure some of you “in the biz” will be quick to point out that advertising is actually building and fueling social media. Without advertising, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google + and any other social networking service wouldn’t exist.

But there are two things I’d like to point out.

Insane Valuations Drive More Irrelevant Advertising

Twitter has raised $760 Million in VC funding at a $8.4 Billion valuation. How are they going to justify that valuation? Advertising. Ever since @DickC took over as CEO he’s determined to pursue the very revenue model that the original founders said they wouldn’t pursue. Guess that’s why @biz and @ev are out.

A few promoted accounts and promoted trends aren’t going to get Twitter to where they need to be. So now they’re going to start pushing tweets on users from accounts they aren’t following. There’s only so much space on Twitter to put ads and the they’re going to have to milk all of it.

I’ve always felt Twitter had better opportunities outside of advertising, but advertising’s easy. Marketers tend to be lazy and they’d rather buy fans than earn fans.

Get used to more, not less advertising.

There Are Other Revenue Models Besides Advertising. 

Tumblr, has been able to get away without selling adverting. As far as I can tell they’re just selling premium themes. I’m afraid at some point they’ll give into advertising but I think it’s most likely they’ll go the ad network route and let their users sell advertising on their sites through Tumblr. We’ll see.

Turntable.fm, while it’s new and it’s model is unproven makes money through affiliate sales of music. Even Pandora and Spotify who sell advertising allow you to pay a premium to skip the adverts. Granted those last two aren’t a social network where I would argue Turntable.fm is.

Enterprise social networks are obviously one model where it’s advertising free, but in these cases the users don’t pay for it, the corporations do.

Would you pay for a premium social network?

I’m to the point where I think I would.

Update: Just came across this infographic from MDG Advertising (who are going to be biased in their own way) shows how Twitter is effecting the ad biz.

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