• The Wall Street Journal, Friday, February 3, 2012 11:28 AM

Still processing the implications of a public Facebook, The Wall Street Journal suggests that advertisers will pay a price for the change. “For advertisers on Facebook Inc., the free ride may be coming to an end,” it writes. As stockholders demand additional profits, Facebook will likely demand more fees from advertisers. “For years, many advertisers simply set up shop for free on Facebook, displaying their brands to users who ‘liked’ them,” WSJ explains. “But to see how Facebook now hopes to turn many of those advertisers into paying customers, look at how it convinced clothing retailer Gordmans to stop relying on free Facebook marketing and to start spending on a new kind of Facebook ad called ‘Sponsored Stories.’”

Showing that saturation is weighing on advertisers’, too, a new study by marketing firm BlitzLocal, conducted between June 1 and Dec. 31 of last year, revealed that unpaid displays of marketing posts to users decreased 33% among its roughly 300 clients. "Content that used to live for a day may now live minutes in a user's News Feed," Dennis Yu, chief executive of BlitzLocal, tells WSJ. Helping marketers stand out in the crowd, Facebook last year unveiled a new ad format, dubbed Sponsored Stories, which requires marketers to pay for exposure for their posts -- “including some they might once have gotten for free,” WSJ adds.

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »