Now that Wall Street has wet its pants for two days in a row, ‘cos Facebook lost less money than expected selling crappy ad space on mobile devices, it’s worth taking the time to read Derek Thompson’s excellent piece “The Dark Side of Facebook’s Triumphant Day,” over at the Atlantic. As he points out… Mobile advertising -- the elusive golden snitch of the social media biz -- increased infinity percent (that's a real statistic!) from $0.00 a few months ago to $153 million in the last quarter. Which means: Facebook is now on pace to make more than $1 billion in the next year from a business that didn't exist in 2011. His final paragraph sums the current fucked up thinking on Wall Street perfectly… Facebook and Google face the same problem. They're trying to figure out how to make money in a mobile world where screens are too small for ads to be beautiful and customers are too reluctant to share information for ads to be actually useful. In the long run, anything can happen, and I'm not one to bet against the smartest engineers and executives in the world. But for now, in the early years of the smartphone, the guys making mad money off mobile aren't in Mountain View or Palo Alto. They're in Cupertino. Too fucking true on that!
Advertising is for douchenozzles!
