Facebook Doesn’t Want Celebs Selling On Personal Pages: Blocks Ad.ly
April 11th, 2011
Ad.ly is an interesting platform. Essentially is a way for brands to have their message shared through celebrity endorsements using social media. Though they have been doing this on Twitter for a while now, I guess Facebook isn’t to pleased by this type of advertisement and have blocked Ad.ly.
The program, which started using Facebook last fall received the boot last week due to what Facebook is calling a breach in their terms of service. So why is Facebook so upset? Media Memo, who originally broke the story described the reason as: 1) It argues that in at least one case Ad.ly has created a “fake” profile for a celebrity, which Ad.ly says it needed to do for technical reasons involving Facebook’s API and; 2) it doesn’t want any users using their Facebook profiles to sell stuff, period; it wants that to happen on Facebook user pages. Ad.ly later corrected Media Memo by highlighting that they have always used LIKE pages and not profiles.
Ad.ly says they will be finding new “underground” ways to continue to offer their platform, but were not willing to share these plans.