Facebook Vanity URLs

Everybody with a business head on their shoulders has said since the first days of Facebook – where’s the revenue? For quite a while nobody could understand just how Facebook was going to make any money from its rapidly growing social networking site.

Eventually we saw the rise of their advertising with skyscraper banners and little text based adverts making the company many millions of dollars in revenue. We also all got a virtual bikini and flowers bought for us by friends which again cost the users money generating further revenue to the company.

Many critics have been commenting on Facebook for some time now saying that it isn’t generating sufficient revenue in order to stay up. If you consider the time, resource and improtantly hosting there must be massive costs associated with storing and serving up all of that data.

In another attempt to generate money, Facebook is contemplating the idea of vanity URLs for its customers. Many celebrtities have already been granted these for free in a format such as www.facebook.com/yourname which it now wants to offer as a paid option to users.

Good idea or Bad idea?…… only time will tell. With the rivalry between users on Facebook they may find people having to buy these urls just to keep up with the trend and not be noticed for having a poor mans url instead of a fancy vanity one. I personaly don’t think that this is the best exploit for finance this incredible site could be making but clearly they’re starting to clutch at straws in order to keep the company afloat.

Only time will tell.