• Fortune, Wednesday, May 14, 2008 11 AM

Nobody's up in arms yet, but Fortune writer Jesse Hempel said that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is starting to take hits from Facebook users, developers and advertisers. Unrest amongst your entire constituency usually presages the end for a public figure or company CEO, but Facebook is private, with aspirations of eventually going public.

In many ways, Hempel suggests that this is Zuckerberg's most trying time as CEO. The past two years have been a period of phenomenal growth for Facebook, doubling 12 times over since September 2006, when Zuckerberg opened the site to non-students. The Facebook Platform six months later was another great success that bred copycat responses from nearly every one of its competitors. But then there's the moneymaking side of things, which continues to be a big flop. The release last November of Social Ads, Zuckerberg's self-proclaimed advertising revolution, led by the intrusive monitoring program, Beacon, drew nothing but a thunderous chorus of boos from users and the media.

Hempel said that Facebook's biggest concern now has to be the attitude of media buyers. Despite tremendous traffic, studies show that social networking users simply don't pay attention to ads. As such, Yahoo sites may sell for an estimated $13 CPM, while Facebook goes for as little as 15 cents. As one media buyers said, take Beacon out of the equation, and Facebook "just becomes another buy, and there are cheaper, more efficient ways to reach eyes."

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