Mediabistro.com’s editorial department received an early copy of The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick’s book that takes an inside look at Facebook.
One interesting section discusses the company’s ad strategy, namely whether or not to post a banner ad on the site’s homepage. Now gone co-founder Eduardo Saverin had two ideas for monetizing the site — a homepage banner and an additional pop-up page that showed up when making a new friend request.
“To [Mark]Zuckerberg-fanatically devoted to making his service easy to use-that was apostasy. But Saverin thought it made sense because in the interim you could show the user an additional ad. There couldn’t be a worse reason to do it, in Zuckerberg’s opinion.”
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The story goes on to explain that placing a banner ad on the homepage “was the worst possible thing [the site] could do,” said another co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz. “We thought we would make more revenue in the long run if we didn’t compromise the site.”
You can hear more about the forthcoming book when it’s author, Kirkpatrick, will be interviewed on Mediabeat in mid-June.