In light of Facebook’s disappointing IPO, I'll pull up an article I wrote in February, which said, “... social networks have always been poor at monetizing their traffic, and that hasn’t changed since they gain popularity. Click-thru rates for ads on social networks have always been really low, so they can’t charge nearly as much as Google per pageview. That hasn’t changed since social networks entered the internet landscape and won’t change in the future.”
In our current poor economic times when the government and businesses are having trouble balancing their budgets, we’re seeing them come up with some creative ways to derive additional revenue.
It seems like whenever cities need to balance their budgets, one of the first areas to cut is education. School districts have resorted to selling advertising on school websites. I’m all for it as long as the ads are clean and don’t offend any parents.