Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, Flickr et al have monetization backwards. So does every other company that relies on people to be successful. Social media needs a new revenue strategy, and services with millions of users are sitting on a goldmine.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I have millions of users focusing on each other. Why don't they notice the ads I show them on the side of the page??

According to Wikipedia: “Social media is a term used to describe the type of media that is based on conversation and interaction between people online.”  Why then, are social media companies applying the same monetization approaches that have been used for the past hundred and fifty years on traditional media like newspapers, magazines, and every other type of print publication – by selling ads on the top and sides of the page – to monetize social media apps? Spending dollars on websites in the hopes of getting noticed is archaic.

Conversation. Interaction. People. Quite clearly, on social websites, we are focusing on ourselves, our friends, and the cool things we are all doing.  We could care less about ads that are located on the side of the page because they are removed from the conversations we are having. In fact, we have trained ourselves to ignore traditional display or banner ads (regardless of how contextually relevant they are) because we control our viewing experience on the web. We simply don’t care to see things that are outside of our personal bubbles.

What is clear is that traditional display ads are not doing a very good job of moving people into the marketing funnel because they don’t make sense on social websites. Marketers know this, and are desperately trying to find any and every way to be relevant to consumers in this new social web environment. In order to fix what’s broken, marketing dollars need to drill down a layer to the most common denominator of all social websites: people. Who cares about trying to run ads on sites where you think your target consumers are going to be (and then crossing your fingers that your ad will be noticed), if your ad is not attached to my friend, I simply will not care about it.

Shortbord thinks social media monetization is upside down. In order to make money, social websites need to stop serving ads AT people and start serving ads WITH them. People are already the distribution channel for content on the social web. When people become the advertising distribution channel, ads become noticed and finally relevant.

Simple, visual ad unit that doesn't get in the way. I notice it because its relevant to my friend

We should monetize ourselves just like websites do – by attaching an ad unit to every post that our audience sees. People are just like websites in that some of us serve billions of impressions per month (yup, that’s a fact) and others serve only hundreds. But the point is, that these impressions we are serving are better than traditional display ads because they’re ours, and we are influencers to every one of our friends, family, followers, and passers-by. People are interesting, whether we know them or not. If its relevant to my friend, the person I follow, the celebrity I love, then its relevant to me too. Let us – the people – sell ads that we want to see and websites will finally make money that matches their popularity.