Did the internet kill the radio tower?

"Half your advertising budget is wasted.  You just don't know which half."

The other day I turned on my radio on the drive home from work.  There was a breaking news story I was interested in ("breaking" as in, it was actually happening at the time, not "someone told the Chyron writer to make something look important").  I hadn't done that in months.  Years ago, listening to the radio was an integral part of making a cross-country trip, just as reading the Sunday funnies and (lightly) browsing the rest of the newspaper used to be a regular habit.  Even not so long ago, listening to the news on the way home was the default option.

Then came podcasts.  I was a bit late to the game, mostly because I'm somewhat deliberately lazy about adopting new technology, but once I got a suitable app set up to my liking, podcasts rapidly took over.  I could pick out whatever information or entertainment I wanted streamed into my brain, rewind or fast forward as needed and never have to worry about reception.  The only downside is needing to get everything set up nicely before actually starting the car moving.  I'm sure there are apps for that, but as I said, I'm a bit lazy about apps and such.

I know that people still listen to the radio.  Somehow my switching over didn't magically cause everyone else to stop tuning in to their favorite on-air personalities and call-in shows.  But for a certain kind of listener, there's little reason to fiddle with a radio.  Chances are you can livestream your favorite sports events if you like, though then you do have to worry about reception.

Podcasts, livestreams and other online content don't just change things for listeners.  There's a crucial difference for the people creating and distributing the content.  Even if "podcast" deliberately sounds like "broadcast", it's actually a classic example of narrowcasting -- delivering content directly to the "content consumers" based on their particular preferences.

Broadcasting is anonymous.  I send a signal into the ether and whoever picks it up picks it up.  I have no direct way of knowing how many people are listening, much less who.  Obviously this is much more anonymous than the internet.  It also has economic implications.

There are two main ways of paying for content: subscription and advertising.  In either case, it's valuable to know exactly who's on the other end.  Narrowcasting gives very find-grained information about that, while broadcasting provides only indirect, aggregated information based on surveys or, failing that, the raw data of who's buying advertising and how much they're paying.  Between that and satellite radio's subscription model, is there any room left for broadcast radio?

Probably.  I mean, it hasn't gone away yet, any more than printed books have.

Sure, broadcasters and the people who advertise on broadcast radio don't have detailed information about who's listening to the ads, but that may not matter.  The advertiser just needs to know that spending $X on old-fashioned radio advertising brings in more than $X in business.  The tools for figuring that out have been around since the early days of radio.

If people still find radio advertising effective, the broadcaster just has to know that enough people are still buying it to keep the lights on and the staff paid.  In a lot of cases that staff is shared across multiple physical radio stations anyway (and the shows, I would expect, are sent to those stations over the internet).  In other words, it may be valuable to know in detail who's listening to what, but it's not essential.

On the other hand, if broadcast radio does go away, I probably won't find out about it until I happen to switch my car audio over to it and nothing's there.

A decoy within a decoy ...

It's not news that more-or-less legitimate news sites like to surround their articles with enticing links to somewhat-less-legitimate news sites: 20 reasons your dog may be considering a new career ... You'll never believe this simple secret for removing egg yolk from pine trees ... Read this before you buy a moose ... you know, those sorts of things.

Click through on one of those and there's a good chance there will be some sort of slide show surrounded by a minefield of garish ads.  Sure, why not?  Putting together pictures of whatever sort of fluff for people to page through is somewhere around neutral on my personal scale of good or bad ways to make a living.

Except, when you lay out the page with a large ad at the top with an arrow icon next to it, and white space between, looking for all the world like it's going to take you to the article you're really interested in (well, at least maybe kinda interested in).  Except that arrow icon takes you to the advertiser's page.  That tilts ever so slightly toward "bad" in my book.  For the reader, it's a straight-up bait and switch.  For the advertiser, it's a steady stream of annoyed readers and, if it's a pay-per-click model, they get to pay for the privilege.  True, there's not supposed to be any such thing as bad publicity, but still.

Spam links and the economics thereof

I can't remember the word for this, but I know I don't like it ...

You go to a more-or-less reputable news site, say for a mass-market but not-quite-tabloid newspaper, and read an article.  To the side of the article is a list of related articles.  Towards the bottom of the list, or maybe in a different section that looks pretty much identical to the first list, are links to a few more articles, with catchy headlines and/or pictures.

Except they're actually external links to infomercial-style ads, or fluffy articles with ads in every direction, or fluffy articles that want you to wade through an extra page of ad links before you can even see them.

Nothing illegal or immoral going on here, just annoying, and somehow more annoying because there's generally some hint on the original page -- fine print, an "elsewhere on the web" section header or such -- to let you know that these are not from the same source.  If you're looking.

It's a trade-off of reputation for revenue.  Roughly, the levels are

• Top news sites (at least "top" in my estimation), just don't do this.
• Many sites link to sites with somewhat more ads and somewhat less substantial articles, and make it clear that "that's them, not us, but try this if you're looking for mindless fun"
• Some sites link to outright crap and make only a minimal "see, it says right here" effort to disclose it.
• And then there is outright phishing, which is immoral, and often illegal.  Sort of an informational bait-and-switch.

The interesting territory is in the middle.  You can probably tell something about how a site is faring if it shifts one way or another on this scale.

Just when I thought I understood this "e-commerce" stuff ...

... I was looking for clothes on a major retailer's web site.  Scrolling down, I see a bunch of "sponsored links" at the bottom.  For other stores.

For the same items I'm looking for.

For less.

Huh?

Bandwidth is the new coverage

Something caught my ear on the radio today: an ad from a major cell provider twitting the competition for making all sorts of claims about speed (and then claiming to be the fastest themselves ... so there!)

Not so long ago the battle was over coverage, but evidently coverage is now about as good as it's going to get.  The internet connectivity of a phone is now a bigger selling point than the mere fact that you can call people with it.  If you're outside the US, or just more into smart phones than I am, this may well be old news.  I tend to use my phone predominately as a phone and an alarm clock, probably because I almost always have access to WiFi and a decent-sized screen and keyboard [Hmm ... this one might be worth a followup -- D.H. Dec 2015].

So far I've found a smartphone most useful as an easily portable GPS, an application for which I'd gladly trade speed for coverage.  A GPS function without a usable map is not much use if you're lost out in the boonies.  But maybe that's just me.



What also caught my ear about the ad was that carriers appear to be claiming to be "X times faster."  Faster than what, I'm not really sure, but it sounded reminiscent of internet providers claiming to be "X times faster" than dialup.  Even with that nice low bar set, providers had trouble providing quite what they promised.  Perhaps cell providers will do better in that regard?

Google chutzpah

Maybe there's something to this whole "long tail" thing after all.

Ad writer Alec Brownstein spends $1 each to become the top ad result on six searches. The searches are for the names of six hiring managers. The ads read "Hey so and so! Googling yourself is a lot of fun. So is hiring me." with a link to his home page. He gets four interviews and two job offers, one of which he accepts.

This seems like one of those ideas that's great if you're the first person to come up with it, not so great if you're one of a horde of copycats. Kind of like the Million Dollar Home Page. Still a neat hack, though.

Ok, this is a bit annoying

I'm at an airport (a lot of it going around lately) and they offer free wi-fi. I connect and bring up a web page. As usual, there's a page to accept the terms and conditions. Fine, par for the course.

Then there's a brief 30-second ad before my actual web page loads. OK, fine, an airport has to make a buck.

Then my web page loads. With a frame full of ads at the top. Oh come on.

Come to find out there's a banner full of ads at the top of every page that loads. Now that's just annoying.

Funny how my eye seems to have tuned out the top part of the page ...

Your blog post published successfully! Now look at these ads.

Somewhere along the line, blogger has started advertising to bloggers. Often when I publish a post now, I see a prominent box in what used to be a nice, empty space to the right of the page. In the box are a handful of Google ads driven by the content of the just-published post [The box has been there for quite a while, but it's only lately that I've seen ads in it. This may be because I happened to post on a couple of topics people are actually interested in. I promise it won't happen again.].

Google itself may be a brilliant example of "dumb is smarter", but Google AdWords are generally evidence that sometimes dumb is just dumb. That's probably not just due to AdWords as a technology, but to the business model of selling words to whoever will buy them up, and to some advertisers' practice of buying up anything and everything. Put it all together and Lucky's speech in waiting for Godot can start to look strangely coherent.

I'm only slightly annoyed at seeing my nice pretty blank space sullied by ads. What strikes me more is that Google has determined that bloggers are a market. This seems obvious in retrospect, as there are millions of us, but it wasn't supposed to work that way, was it? Put up a blog, watch millions of people read it, clean up by selling ads. Wasn't that the story? Come to find out that in a world where there are hordes of writers and no guarantee of readers, going after the writer seems the more sensible approach. Ironic, dontcha think?

[Blogger stopped doing this long enough ago I don't remember.  Probably not too long after I posted this, not that I think that had anything to do with it --D.H. May 2015]

More mild silliness from the world of online publishing

Continuing the theme of "advertising, sure, obnoxious advertising, no," I was just browsing a well-known site I hadn't been to in a while, reading a reasonably interesting post. The post had a link to an earlier post on the same site. It looked interesting, so I clicked through and started reading.

Not long afterwards, the entire page grayed out and a big honking popup popped up telling me that I could keep reading if I registered with their site. If there was any indication this was coming, I sure missed it. Ah, the joys of ECMAScript.

Yeesh.

I'm used to seeing the first couple of paragraphs of an article with a link labeled something like "Registered users can click here for the rest of the article" and another for "Register now." There are several variants on that theme, of course. It's standard fare in the academic world where anyone can see the abstract but you have to order the article (unless I'm mistaken, that model predates the web).

But this is one step beyond. Not only can I not see the rest of the article, I can't even see what I was just looking at before the obnoxious popup came along. Make up your mind: Do you want me to read it or not? Guess I'll just have to view the page source ...

Except here's the weird thing. I went back to the page to see the popup in action again, the better to snipe at it ... and it wasn't there. Clicked on a link to something else archival looking. Nope. Another link? Still nothing. I'm starting to think I imagined the whole thing. But it looked so vivid and lifelike.

So what's the point? I'm guessing their script wasn't working quite as intended. Either that or it's some sort of online game of "flinch". Will this popup scare you away from trying to read the rest of the article? No? Well, OK, I guess you can go ahead ... but I made you flinch, didn't I?

Chasing my (long) tail

Perusing the statistics on who's reading this blog (a fairly quick read), I notice a recent arrival. Tailsweep, an online advertising entity evidently with one foot in the UK and one in Sweden, has taken an interest. Their idea is to gather together all the rest of the material after you get past Gizmodo and the other most heavily-visited sites and try to wring some advertising revenue out of them collectively. Just how, I'm not exactly sure, but hey, why not?

I might as well lay out my position on advertising here: I'm not against it in principle. On the other hand, I find it distracting on other sites, so I'm in no hurry to put up ads here without a good reason, which is currently nowhere in sight.

Actually, I find advertising distracting on some other sites. If I'm googling around for information on, say, some esoteric aspect of Java sockets, I don't really care to see links for vacations to Java or custom light sockets. OK, that's an an exaggeration, but you get the idea. I understand it all has to get paid for somehow, but too often said ads are attached to a forum thread that reads something like this:

• Looking for info on Java sockets. Um ... I can't get sockets to work in Java.
• Re: Looking for info on Java sockets. Hey ... I can't get them to work either.
• Re: Looking for info on Java sockets. Has either of you tried reading the Javadocs?

OK, that's a slight exaggeration too, but you get the idea. I'm also not fond of ads disguised as links, though I understand the thinking that led to them. Or maybe because I understand the thinking that led to them.

On the other hand, I don't mind at all seeing ads on a major news site, partly because my visual system has largely learned how to tune them out on the sites I frequent, but mostly because I understand that all those reporters have to get paid. Unlike me, they don't have a day job to fall back on. Writing the stuff is their day job. Likewise for major blogs that are updated several times a day and have wide audiences.

But this isn't one of those. It's a hobby, one which attracts a smattering of hits, these days mostly, it seems, from people curious about Omegle or when the Information Age began. Perez Hilton I'm not.

To be crystal clear here: It's very gratifying that someone might find those posts worth reading. Likewise, if you've read this far on this one, many thanks for that as well. My best information as of this writing is that you're in pretty select company. That being the case, it's hard for me to see how there could be enough advertising potential in these pages to be worth anyone's time.

Should that change, and I'm guessing that would require a couple of orders of magnitude more visitors than I currently have, I'll gladly reconsider. Yes, dear reader, I have only your interests at heart. I will magnanimously spare you the annoyance of ads on this site -- unless someone will pay me enough to offset my mental anguish in putting you through them.

[Tailsweep is still around, but the link above redirects to a Swedish site claiming to be Sweden's most active ... something or other ... in social media ... press the "translate" button ... Sweden's most active follower in social media.  Whatever that may mean.  It seems to have been bought out by Bonnier Group, a Swedish holding company, but you won't see that on the English version of the page.

Traffic on Field Notes appears to be higher than when this post was written, if only because crawlers visiting every page have more pages to visit, I suspect, but my back-of-the-envelope calculations continue to suggest that I'd need a couple of orders of magnitude more traffic to make ads worthwhile.  So if you've read this far and you really, really want to see ads on this site, please tell 100 of your friends. --D.H. Jan 2016]

News without paper

Two sad items for those in the old-fashioned newspaper business, both from the western US:

• Denver's Rocky Mountain News is shutting down, for good, "just 55 days shy of its 150th birthday." This leaves the Denver Post as the only mainstream daily in town.
  
• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, already sharing most of its infrastructure with the Seattle Times, has announced that it will cease print publication, reduce staff from 180 to around 20, and publish entirely online. The P-I is only a few years younger than the Rocky Mountain News. To my knowledge it is the first major US city daily to go this route (the Christian Science Monitor made the switch a while ago, but it's not a city daily).
  

In both cases the problem is economics. Not the global downturn/recession/whatever-we-call-it, mind. Both papers had survived the Great Depression and several other upheavals and panics. The problem is advertising. Competition from online sources is killing classified ads. Nor is moving online an easy option, though the P-I is going to have a go at it, because online ads just don't pull in as much money as print ads used to.

So: Online advertising is (obviously) real. Publishing on line is inherently less costly than publishing in print -- which is why 100+ people in Seattle are losing their jobs -- but even together it's an open question whether this adds up to viable online city newspapers. Or whatever you call a newspaper that's not on paper.

When I travel, I often pick up a copy of the local paper, even if it's a slow news day, just to get a bit of the flavor of the place. Just the name Post-Intelligencer lets you know you're in Seattle and nowhere else. Likewise with the Plain Dealer, Free Press or Mercury News. Even the more common names are quirky. One city's World is another's Globe, one's Chronicle another's Journal.

Papers have been losing flavor for years, though, as more and more of them get bought up by national chains, and again the driver is economics. With this in mind, it's not quite right to say that the economics of online advertising is killing the dailies. Nonetheless, it certainly does seem set to deal a number of death blows.

We're only in it for the money

In this week's Techtonic Shifts column in Newsweek, in a piece entitled Time to Hang Up the Pajamas, Daniel Lyons delivers a few home truths about the blogosphere. The gist is: almost no one makes much money blogging, though a very few do quite well. "Monetizing" blogs and social networking in general is proving harder than some may have expected. As Lyons says,

Advertisers shy away from blogs because they're too unpredictable and because few blogs attract anything approaching a mass audience—and even those that do face so much competition that ad rates remain pitifully low.

It's not the economy. It's systemic. It's the promise of narrowcasting fulfilled. It's very easy for me to get my message out to whoever might be interested in random thoughts about the web and the technology floating around it. It's easy for someone interested in, say, Deutsch's fallacies to find my take on it, and thence the list itself.

But from a business point of view, who cares? At some point it's nice that I could get some money out of writing up my random thoughts instead of no money, but I'm orders of magnitude away even from that point, and there are scads and scads of other bloggers out there in the same boat. Conversely, if you have something of interest to a ma$$ audience, blogging is not a great way to cash in. Lyons again:

Some A-list bloggers have found that the best way to "monetize" their work is by returning to the much-maligned "mainstream media"—like political writer Andrew Sullivan, whose blog, The Daily Dish, now runs on The Atlantic Monthly Web site.

Lyons also mentions purely online outlets like the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast but argues, with some reason, that these are basically online media companies that happen to include blogging. In short, if you want to make money writing, you go through a publisher, just like always (or occasionally you hit a home run without a publisher, just like always).

There does seem to be a slow shift from publishing on paper to publishing on line, but -- beating the not-so-disruptive technology drum one more time -- it seems much more likely that the business world is driving the technology world and not the other way around. If the technology really were disruptive, we'd be seeing very little paper publishing and lots of electronic self-publishing. Instead, we see a much slower shift away from paper than the technology will allow and most of the actual money still going through corporate publishers.

(It occurs to me that the shift to paper seems to corrolate with frequency of publishing. Newspapers have been significantly affected by the web, particularly by the advent of online analogs to classified and personal ads. Book publishing is almost unaffected. In the middle, most major magazines have online presence but continue to publish on paper. Or on the other hand, maybe the distinction between news and fiction -- fill in your own punchline on that one -- is more siginficant. But I digress.)

In any case, I'm happy to keep cranking out my ten or so posts a month when time permits, safe in the knowledge that whatever I do, it's unlikely to rock anyone's boat very much. If you're in the blogosphere, odds are you're there for the same reason you're in a band in college: because it's what you want to do, not because you expect to make a living at it.

FZ, RIP.

Call or click today

It's hardly breaking news but ...

Back in days of yore, when the Ginsu_TM Knife was king of the airwaves, no self-respecting late night TV pitch was complete without the tag line "Operators are standing by." These days (and even in those days, for that matter) there's no one actually operating the telephone equipment, so you talk to "service representatives" and such. That's assuming you even want to bother with the phone. Most of the time you can order your Chia Pet_TM online in a fraction of the time. Thus the new tag line: "Call or click today."

Pop culture is one of the strongest indicators of whether a technology has made it. Can you get it at your local big-box store? Does it turn up on the TV news as backdrop for some other story? Does your non-technical uncle ask you about it? By that standard, e-commerce is definitely here. Has been for some time. Like I said, hardly breaking news, but perhaps it's noteworthy how unnoteworthy it is.



Pop culture notes:

Ah, the Ginsu knife. Unfortunately the current Wikipedia article on it is somewhat garbled and I haven't the energy at the moment to help fix it. To make matters worse, there appear to be at least two prominent web sites hawking what appear to be Ginsu products, one of which appears, by cross-reference with Wikipedia, to be the genuine article from Douglas Quikut. The other, despite its genuine-looking logo, seems to use "Ginsu" some places and "Ginzu" in others and doesn't seem to mention Douglas Quikut at all. So I won't reference it and I'll leave it to the lawyers to sort out who's which.

Ah, Chia Pets. From the days of my youth my reaction to Chia has been a profoundly visceral "Huh?" Someone must like them, though. They're still going strong.

How disruptive is online advertising?

A Forrester Research report quoted in a Wall Street Journal article, neither of which seems easy to access on line, says that Kids These Days spend more time online now than they do watching TV (apparently a good chunk of that time is spent gaming). Widespread adoption of broadband connections (or at least, considerably-faster-than-dialup connections) has been a big driver for this.

This is causing both major advertisers and major online advertising players to re-think how best to reach consumers in the new higher-bandwidth net.world. In the case in point, Proctor & Gamble and Google are going so far as to exchange employees, the better to understand each other's cultures and outlooks. An odder couple you couldn't ask for, and yet it appears to make business sense.

On the one hand, this is just another chapter of the "How do we make money off this 'web' thing?" saga that's been playing itself out slowly but surely for the last decade or so. But on the other hand, it gains a bit more urgency when rephrased as "We need to make money off this 'web' thing. The other stuff is drying up!"

My feeling continues to be that the web will have much more impact on how companies make money than on which companies are making it. That certainly seems to be the lesson from the dot.com boom and bust: WebVan folded but brick-and-mortar grocery stores still take orders online. EToys got bought out by KB Toys and Walmart and Target went online. Not to say that new companies haven't sprung up -- Google, Amazon and EBay come to mind -- just that old companies adapting has been more the norm.

In fact, the how is not necessarily changing that much. P&G still makes money selling soap, grocery stores still sell groceries and toy stores still sell toys. The big difference is in how they reach their customers. And even then, an ad still looks pretty much like an ad and an online catalog still looks a lot like a catalog.

Why advertising won't die

Alex Papadimoulis of The Daily WTF, in the course of not apologizing for running ads, said it:

I really don’t hate advertising. And neither do most of you. We just hate obnoxious advertising.

I don't really have anything to add to that, except that if you've ever been tormented by the sneaking feeling that software isn't always quite what it ought to be, the WTF offers solace and insight. And it's trenchantly funny.

The Attention Economy: What's new?

Speaking of video ...

There's something primal in the attractive power of a flickering TV screen, some circuit deep in the brain that says "I need to look at that. It might be important." We know that the circuit in question must be fairly inacessible because that gut feeling that the pretty pictures might be important is practically always wrong, and yet we continue to gravitate.

Sometimes we watch the pretty pictures because they inform, more often because they entertain, but mostly, it would seem, because they keep us occupied until the real payload comes along: more pretty pictures meant to get us to buy cars, or beer, or beauty products or best of all, a new and bigger TV. To which we can then be even more strongly attracted, and in which we can be even more thoroughly immersed, than ever.

Don't get me wrong. I like TV, particularly when the NCAAs are on. I'm just wondering what exactly is the new part of the idea of grabbing people's attention and extracting money from them, which, if I understand it, is the basis of the "Attention economy".

Or is the attention economy about amassing and trading data about what people are paying attention to? That's surely a means to the end of extracting money from said attention. Granted, the web adds something new here: It's much easier to collect precise and copious data on which pages people are clicking on, as opposed to estimating what they're watching on the TV. But as far as analyzing that data in a widely-accepted and understood way, and actually "monetizing" it, the web still seems to be playing catch-up to Nielsen.

Maybe I'm being too glib here. Once again, I'm really just pushing back against the idea that The Web Changes Everything. The more I study the matter, the more I think that much of the low-hanging fruit was picked generations ago (at least). To paraphrase someone: The web is new and significant, but what's significant isn't new, and what's new isn't significant. That's a strawman position, and I don't really believe anything quite that strongly put, but I do find it a useful lens through which to examine what I run across.

My vote for most annoying new web site feature of 2007 ...

... goes to those double-underlined links that pop an ad up in your face when you try to chase them. I can understand the desire to get some kind of revenue out of providing useful information, but this stuff makes me think of Digicrime (no double underlines on that one, but please read their disclaimer before you go playing around there).

But what if I don't want Coke to be my friend?

This is old news by now, but I wanted to explore it anyway.

A couple of years ago a younger relative, then still in college, showed me Facebook. At the time I didn't really get the concept, but I figured there was probably something to it since my relative thought it was pretty cool. On the other hand, my first instinct was to wonder about privacy.

At the risk of dating myself (but then, I do give my age in my profile), I cut my social net.teeth on BBSs and Usenet. On BBS's, people almost universally went by handles and not by their real names, a practice that almost certainly traces back to CB culture. On Usenet, you went by your email address and .sig, which could be revealing (david.hull@myschool.edu) or concealing (mysterious@whoknows.com or even an12345@anon.penet.fi) according to your choice and what you could get your local admins to go along with.

In either case you were faceless (at least at the time) and there was at least a good possibility if not an outright expectation that your name would be made-up. Coming from that perspective, and knowing that every single post to alt.stuff.hairy.hairy.hairy and rec.pigeon-fanciers is preserved in amber for all time, I was somewhat taken aback by the idea of a site that not only showed your real name, but your picture and whatever other personal information you chose to put up.

Why would people do this, I thought? Well first, not everyone's as camera-shy as I am. From talking to people, there also seems to be the perception that if you're doing something on you computer in the privacy of your room, you're doing it in your room and not in the net. Finally, though, I suspect that, even though the information is readily available, people may not fully appreciate the distinction between one's friends (a human-sized hand-picked list) and one's network (a city-sized collection of people you mostly wouldn't know from Adam).

As an aside, there's some interesting graph theory to be explored in modeling social networks. Your PhD awaits ...

Where this all comes to a head is the economics of identity. I've argued already that anonymity services must be understood in economic terms, particularly regarding the value each party places on anonymity. Conversely, a service like Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn is a veritable mother lode of marketing data, much of it apparently available for free.

I say "apparently" because if this data is really free, it's almost certainly mispriced. Mispricing means arbitrage opportunity, and arbitrage opportunity means new, fair price. At a first guess, the value of belonging to a social network is something like

• Convenience of being able to keep in touch with your friends and vice versa
• Minus hassle of being in touch with people you'd rather not be in touch with
• Plus joy of discovering interesting things about other people
• Minus embarrassment of realizing that your prospective employer can see those pictures of you doing jello shots which seemed like such a good idea to post
  
• Plus value of learning about cool new stuff advertised on the site
• Minus pain of advertisements you don't want

Users can manage the first two by tweaking their friend lists. People appear to be growing more savvy about divulging personal information. One source tells me that juniors are now advised to scrub their Facebook sites a good year in advance of graduating and entering the job market.

The last two are, as I understand it, going through an interesting period of adjustment. One method of adjustment is for users to vote with their feet and stop using the service (or stop using it as much). This makes the site as a whole and advertising on it in particular less valuable. Presumably, really cool advertisements could make a service more attractive, with the reverse effect.

I haven't really investigated any of this in detail, other than reading a couple of articles in the popular press, and I'd be particularly interested in comments.