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Showing posts from August, 2012

Bigger ads, bigger bucks? Facebook feels Wall Street heat

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This post was written with Paul Sloan and published on CNET. With Facebook's stock now half of its IPO price, Mark Zuckerberg and company are testing more ways to make money from advertising. And they can do a lot more. See that image above? That's a plain old giant banner ad grabbed from my Facebook page. It appeared after I logged out. Facebook actually calls them "Logged Out" ads. It rolled them out in February when it was trying to show Madison Avenue it was serious about brand advertising in advance of its IPO. A social ad? Sort of, I guess. It wants me to "like" it to get an insurance quote. But make no mistake: While Facebook can come up with whatever terminology it wants, this is the sort of ad that Mark Zuckerberg has long shunned -- the kind that splashes across the page the way one would expect to see on Yahoo, not Facebook. And yet there it is. Which leads to the question of Facebook's cratering stock price, and the pressure Zuckerbe