While it hasn’t been officially announced, there are rumors that Google has started development of a Facebook alternative, which has been dubbed “GoogleMe.” While there are no official releases, I called up some of my friends in the know at Google, who confirmed with me that there have been talks and plans for a while how to compete with Facebook and now they have an official project that will destroy Facebook… or at least take a few users away from Facebook. I did a little thinking over the last day or so about this, and decided that when Google launches this, that this actually has a definite ability to be a Facebook “killer” for a variety of reasons. Read on.

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Over the last 10 years one of the main topics I have covered is advertising fraud. Over and over again fraud keeps on popping up in the industry both from small players to major players. It seems that no matter how much the industry matures, how much technology is created; fraud is a significant issue that siphons both money and confidence away from the industry. I’ve written about banner farms, click-fraud, lead-faking, IP spoofing… you name it. My friend Ben Edelman, famed attorney and Harvard researcher has made it his life to cover issues in interactive advertising and has exposed complex schemes that boggle the mind. Advertising fraud seems to be everywhere in all forms and needs to be exposed, talked about and changed. However, as much as there are obvious kinds of fraud, there are sometimes more nefarious methods of fraud that are not always classified by fraud but still affect the industry significantly and need to be talked about.

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First of all, I don’t hate Facebook anymore than I dislike any internet fad. One of my 30,000 readers asked me why I always write negative things about Facebook. First of all this isn’t quite true, since I’ve written a few articles about how to make money on Facebook and the top ads on Facebook. I just like to question what is going on, look beyond the headlines and the spin. So, in that light, I want to examine the numbers: According to Comscore, in June, over 130 Million people within the US used Facebook. This is about one third of the population of the US that uses Facebook – some of them day after day, many times a day, making it one of the most popular media sources ever in the history of the world. However, despite this, Facebook may only make $1 Billion this next year, even with expected growth. This may seem like a lot money, but it’s actually not – and I know why.

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For some reason this wasn’t covered all that much in the media or in the industry – but its something significant and more importantly something to really think about. Facebook, the king of all social media, is starting to show a serious crack in its armor. According to InsideFacebook, in a graph released, there is a disturbing trend of facebook starting to have a negative growth in the key demographic of 18-35 year-olds. This is something very interesting, and more importantly should disturb Facebook executives enormously.

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Sorry for missing a week of writing, has been a hectic few weeks for me.Anyway, decided it was time to look over the comments that people have left regarding Facebook, Myspace, Performance Based Marketing – curious what people are saying? I was, and you'll find people's comments very interesting.

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This morning, I wanted to talk a little about the incentive marketing game, which still has a significant impact on revenue generation of almost every company in the marketplace. We’ve even come up with a word that my spell-check hates, called incentivization, which is the process where you provide rewards for filling out offers, signing up for a service or some other pay-per-action type service. Incentive based advertising is probably one of the most hated, yet needed systems in the industry and perhaps its time for a frank discussion.

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I wrote a few weeks ago about the issues with performance marketing and display networks, especially with the focus of cost-per-action and cost-per-lead campaigns. As mentioned, I’ve been involved in both the CPA affiliate marketing business and the interactive brand marketing business and know both of them inside out. Also, as mentioned I see the benefits of both, but see that performance based marketing is the future of our industry, and all agencies need to wake up and start learning about this part of the industry immediately.

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