Not All Advertisers Are Upset With Facebook

You may have been confused if you read this morning’s Facebook headlines. The Wall Street Journal says some big ad buyers are questioning how effective their Facebook ads are, while CNET is reporting that Facebook won’t take some advertisers calls when they try to buy ads.

Which report is right? Or are they both right? And does it matter? Probably not, if you’re thinking about buying shares of Facebook after it goes public later this month. What matters for potential investors is that Facebook once again appears to be having trouble demonstrating that it can sustain growth from advertising which, to date, has accounted for about 85% of Facebook’s $4 billion in annual revenue.

But appearances, according to experts interviewed by ReadWriteWeb Wednesday, can be deceiving.

“As you can read many places these days, brands and agencies are griping privately and publicly about a lack of service, but to be fair, Facebook has never said it was a media company. In fact, it seemed as though the strategy in the beginning was less about supporting advertising, as much as maybe enabling it,” said Michael Nicholas, chief strategy officer at Roundarch Isobar.

Nicholas noted that Facebook didn’t seem interested in supporting self-service ads in the way that Google or, more recently, Twitter did. That would distract Facebook from what it sees as its “social mission,” so instead, Facebook published APIs that third parties could build huge tools on top of.

“This is a great strategy if your goal is to remove the burden of directly supporting brands and agencies so you can stay focused on the task at hand,” Nicholas said.

One of those third parties building API ad platforms is