Facebook Turns Back on Making Money ... Again

(MoneyWatch)  You may have read in the last few days that as of 12:01 a.m. Saturday, Facebook will allow Facebook users to secure their username URLs, so that, for instance, yours truly, might lay claim to facebook.com/catharineptaylor, instead of what it is now, which is facebook.com/(some indistinguishable set of numbers).

Valuable to those who want them, right? Right! With that in mind, people at least as wise at myself, like the folks over at Silicon Alley Insider, thought that maybe Facebook, should, like, charge a small fee for those names, maybe $5/year. (Pro-rated that comes to the 1 1/3 pennies per day.) Then, Silicon Alley Insider finds out that Facebook actually considered auctioning usernames, but it decided not to. As Silicon Alley Insider points out, this could've been great. Most of us rank-and-file types would have paid a very small sum for our names, while advertisers with usernames for pages they'd like to secure would have likely paid quite a bit to own a simpler username for their Facebook domain.

The above is yet another example of Facebook turning down an opportunity to actually make money -- and this refusal to turn into a for-profit business is becoming so routine I'm beginning to wonder if the company has developed a pathological fear of asking others to pay money for the considerable value they are getting from Facebook. It's not just users: Facebook doesn't get anything, neither a cut of ad revenue, nor a licensing fee, in exchange for letting other Web sites use Facebook Connect; it has an underdeveloped ad model, in part because it would never consider doing a MySpace by plastering ads all over the place. (On that one, I'm in agreement.)

The pattern here is disturbing, because every time Facebook unleashes something new but refuses to charge for it, it sets a precedent: that the cost of it is free. As the newspaper industry well knows, once that genie is out of the bottle, it is nigh impossible to stuff it back in. Wake up, Facebook. Stop letting your revenue opportunities slip away.

Previous coverage of Facebook on BNET Media:

• Facebook Hires Google AdWords Exec, But Will It Compute?
• Facebook's Faces Head Toward the AARP Zone
• Does Facebook Connect Connect Facebook to Revenue?
• Facebook's Users Spend More ToS Than Twitter's