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Google has honed adwords over the years, advertisers have taken years to become acquainted to it, and users have come to use Google as a jumping off point for transactions. For an apples-to-apples comparison, look at Google's revenues per user when they were Facebook's size – I think you'll find it's a lot closer.

It's inaccurate, rewards stupidity and is route with fraud.

Channel building is far more powerful.

We have clients that once said “I don't want my customers loitering on our website”. Now they realize the true value of engagement, as they have more customers spending hours on their website than are watching the local news channel.

The most difficult problem that marketers face is creating that personalized message in an engaging manner at scale. Ford did this well with the Fiesta, but the methods employed may not work (or be as successful) with the next launch. It quickly becomes the “seen that before – next?” mentality.

The day Facebook comes out with a payment platform is the day stickiness becomes more beneficial than unstickiness.

Facebook sees very little advantage from being sticky at the moment. Because it doesn't get anything when the user takes out their wallets. But this will change as soon as Facebook takes a page out of Apples strategy book. And comes out with the payment platform.

you definitely leave the feed quickly, either to other fb pages or other types of content. i think the future of monetizing facebook is in the feed. it's their biggest non-sticky asset and a source of information that millions of people love now.

The ideal solution is not waiting for inefficient Brand advertising dollars to move online. The internet allows more targeted advertising, and therefore more efficient spending. Facebook should tailor its product to generate some aspect of user intent. This would allow them to deliver the right ads to the right users – a win for revenue, advertiers & users alike.

But for sites that ARE CPM-driven or more generally, for content oriented business model sites, wouldn't you want to be as sticky as possible?

You write “the dominant advertising model on the web – Cost per Click (CPC) – rewards un-sticky websites.”

But who is being rewarded for un-sticky sites?

In the quote you reference above, it seems that Google (or any other CPC serving intermediary) is the primary beneficiary of un-sticky sites since they are the ones who ultimately get more clickthroughs and thus generate more revenue. But in this scenario, the unsticky content website itself seems to lose out.

So when you say “Sticky is bad for business” – do you mean sticky is bad for Google's business? Or do you mean Sticky is bad for the specific website itself. It would seem to be the former, but your title implies the latter…

For Freemium-based businesses stickiness is everything.

Along ‘stickiness’, Facebook recently did some statistical analysis on user engagement. Turns out user activity within a few months of signing up is based on 3 factors:

1) how often a user was reached out to by others
2) frequency of third party application use
3) term they coined “receptiveness” — related to user’s propensity to share

All of these stickiness factors are social – #3 isn’t likely to change, but #1 and #2 are increasing like crazy. also #2 smells like a micropayment gold mine.

food for thought

the problem is that advertising is so often a one-way experience. banner –> click –> advertiser site. brands needs to loosen up, relinquish some of their control and, yes, engage with consumers. so much of online activity is conversation-based, whether thru status msgs, sharing of content, 'liking' or 'recommending' content, even following and retweeting. Conversational marketing really is the future, but it'll take a bit of time to get there as brands get more comfortable with the concept. they need to recognize that the audience is smart and savvy — just because they put out a message, it doesn't mean the audience will buy it (literally or figuratively). having an authentic, transparent relationship with consumers will take them much farther. at True/Slant, we've tried to eliminate the barrier between advertiser and consumer with our T/S Ad Slants. marketers use the same tools as our contributors (entrepreneurial journalists) to self-publish and self-market; see http://trueslant.com/webtrends for an example. it's early yet, but we're optimistic. and, funny to hear 'sticky' after so many years. the buzz words may change but the point remains.

Of course, it is dependent on the nature of the business and business model, but I would argue that stickiness is highly desirable for most businesses.

I don't think I am disagreeing with the points in your post but, humbly, I think the title is misleading…

Although CPMs are based on impressions the ad revenue of a site actually correlates more strongly with UVs. And the best way to generate UVs is to bring in new, casual readers and not maximizing engagement. This is why About.com and Demand Media are cash cows – not sticky but they always have lots of new people cycling through.

Of course I am biased but I think the big future opportunity for advertising is viral distribution. Viral spreads the media to new people so it maximizes UVs and audience size which has always been what advertisers care about. But more importantly it creates demand because viral is essentially word-of-mouth. And consumers trust word-of-mouth more than anything else when it comes to new products.

Effective ads are “Personalized”. All you have to do is figure out Who I am.

Odd comparison to put down Facebook: Isn't starbucks wildly successful?

But my two main points: (1) Like Fred Wilson, I believe that FB + Twitter will drive more traffic than Google within 12 months from now. This is an enormous monetization opportunity. (2) FB has identity warranting, so it will become a central player in the entire online payment system.

Let's not forget that many people lacked the imagination about Google's potential, too, prior to 2003 and the introduction of adwords. At that time, critics said loudly dismissed google. How could google ever generate enough PVs to generate meaningful display ad revenue to compete portals like Yahoo?
I think that seeds of innovation are lurking in your post: Facebook will have to move beyond CPC, for example, just as adwords moved us beyond display ads.

In short, I am bullish that Facebook will be a monster of similar if not bigger size than Google in the end.

I see a day in the not so distant future, where Coke gets smart enough to become people in a place rather than a product in a place. And people who are talking about what they are doing and where they are going are better at building trust than products that sit on the sidebar. My two cents, I suppose.

Zynga is a great example of this. The average Farmville user spends 33 minutes a day tending his crop. Mafia wars players check in for two 20-minute sessions everyday. The stats are astonishing. 97% of zynga's customers just chill out and use the wifi but zynga still gets rich selling ~100% margin coffees to the 3% that buy*. So I would say that when the space in your store infinite, the consumer experience gets better with each additional person that comes in, and COGS are ~0, it is very much in a website's best interest to keep people around as long as possible. Thoughts?

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/23/facebook.gam…

I didn't make Charlie’s event but isn't one of the themes of “commerce 2.0″ that e-commerce sites should increase their stickiness by acting more like media companies and engaging customers higher up in the funnel?

http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2010/03/a_media_com…

*I've omitted the 10% of customers that are monetized via offers for simplicity, but I want to pose this question: why can I as a consumer only unlock the value of offers in games? Why can't I gain access to premium Economist content by signing up for a trial Netflix subscription? For that matter, why can't I buy my starbucks the same way? Would love to hear people's thoughts on why payment aggregation services haven't spread beyond games. Thx.