Valentine’s Day profits massacre
(I’m back-dating because it IS a Valentine’s Day post, and I have other ideas for today anyway.)
So somebody lost Facebook a LOT of money this Valentine’s Day.
The Facebook gift shop has apparently been manifest in some form for awhile, but it was only within the past week that it was added to users’ home pages, on the right sidebar–in fact, is has now disappeared again from that location, but if you go to a person’s profile page and scroll down, you’ll find a “gift box” just above their “wall,” with the option of giving them a gift.
The “gift,” in case you don’t already know, is a brightly colored graphic, less than an inch square on my resolution anyway, designed by Susan Kare, who did the original Mac icons. They’re cute. They cost $1 each.*
They are, of course, totally noncorporeal. Some people might wonder why anyone would pay $1 for some pixels, but the issue here is the nature of gifts, which have never really been about what they are. Or they are other than they seem. Whatever.
Gifts aren’t about necessity, which is why, for instance, bath products are so popular.** Gifts are not about permanence, either–a real flower is much more transient than a digital one. Gifts are generally about reciprocity; it’s embarrassing to get a Christmas gift from someone for whom you have no reciprocal present. And gifts are about giving and getting–giving and getting as social actions, which means that in general, they’re enhanced by an audience.
The major point of flowers on Valentine’s Day is not the flowers themselves. It’s the knowledge that someone loves you and gave you flowers–a knowledge that is even better shared, that is, when all your co-workers can SEE that someone loves you and gave you flowers. What better place to put a gift than Facebook, where the audience is not limited to the recipient’s dorm or office? Where the audience, in fact, is everyone on the site whom the recipient has designated as an Other of some degree of some signifance? And where the newsfeed makes it fairly likely that they’ll see the fact of the gift?
The smartest thing that Facebook did with these gifts was give everyone one free token. One gift to give at no cost–but only one. Unlike MySpace, Facebook does not order friends. You don’t have a Top Eight (and MySpace’s top friends lists are statically ordered, so that even within the Top Eight or Twelve or whatever, you can only ever have ONE Best Friend).
But if you have one gift, and you give it, you’re making a pretty major statement about the recipient you singled out. Unless you give it to a boyfriend/girlfriend-type Significant Other, chances are there are going to be people who thought they were just as important.
The obvious strategy here would be to give NO gifts, but the lure of the free is likely to draw people into giving one that has no cost–and then they’re much more likely to buy more gifts in order to maintain the peace by not overly favoring a single relationship.
Valentine’s Day is obviously a prime occasion for all this gift-giving, and in fact the Facebook giftshop provided seven V-Day only gifts. However, for AT LEAST five hours on Valentine’s Day, the giftshop was inoperable, clearly overloaded by too much traffic.
Most people were probably giving gifts pretty impulsively. If the giftshop wasn’t there when the mood struck them, they probably didn’t keep reloading to see if it was up and running again.** Those five hours of downtime, I suspect, cost Facebook a HUGE potential profit, although they may have coincidentally driven up the social value of those limited edition gifts.
I’m not sure why they took the giftshop link off the home page after V-Day, either. It didn’t take up a lot of room–depending on how many system messages you have in that column, there’s very little in it. Maintaining a link above individual profile’s walls is a good idea, and maybe that’s how people prefer to give a gift anyway, rather than going to the gift shop and having to mentally scroll through one’s friends list to think of whose name to enter.
I’m interested to see what holidays they do this for. Will Easter rate? God, I love Easter crap.
Speaking of which, today being the day after V-Day, I have a strong instinct to search CVS for discounted V-Day stuffies. Oh, pink fluffy imaginary animals, how I love you.
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*Actually, at least for the moment, when you buy one for a dollar you get the option of buying 4 additional gift credits for $2, so that you end up paying $3 for 5 gifts. But I don’t know if that’s a special promotion or what.
**I personally like Lush. I like citrusy scents, massage bars, and bath melts. I do not like things that will coat me with glitter. In case you wondered.
***I am a special obsessive case.
February 16th, 2007 at 1:48 am
Except the gifts were all pretty lame. Its true what you say about the gift itself not mattering… but with such a small selection you can’t really show any thought in picking your gift.
I got my girlfriend the toilet paper, since her suite had run out.
February 16th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
I got my husband nothing. He taped American Idol for me since I have a late stats lab. Our V-Day celebration was to watch the two Idol episodes. it was great.
February 20th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Ian: Don’t you feel that your final sentence negates your criticism about “showing any thought” there?
Carly: One of the big effects of the commercialization of V-Day is a narrow homogenization of what “counts” as a gesture of romantic love. I’ve always said that I would rather receive consumer electronics than expensive chocolates or flowers, although I have to admit that I still appreciate lingerie. :p But anyway, my point is that traditional /= meaningful for a lot of people, and vice versa.