Facebook Vanity Plates

I am pretty sure I am the only person with my name in the world. 99.9% of the time having such a difficult to spell/pronounce first and last name combination is a big pain: I constantly receive misplaced letter; have my name mangled by strangers to the point that I don’t even recognize it; and even have classmates/friends spell my name incorrectly on group papers and correspondence from time to time. But then there’s the .1% of the time that having such an unusual name actually pays off: case in point, I was very easily able to secure my Facebook vanity plate this past weekend.

I tell you this not to rub it in the noses of you that weren’t able secure your name, but because I recently found out that Facebook had originally planned to auction of these vanity plates to the highest bidder. I am fairly certain that I personally wouldn’t have paid to have my vanity plate even if I had a more common name like Sally Jones, but I am also fairly certain that most people out there would have been wiling to pay money for this perk and that I am probably the exception.

So given that a significant percentage of users would probably be willing to pay, why then did Facebook give these away for free? The official reason that Facebook executives eventually changed their minds was because they (a) didn’t want to seem elitist by giving richer people a leg up and (b) feared that hosting several million mini auctions (one for each name) simultaneously would have overloaded the system. I personally think this was a real poor business decision on Facebook’s part. With over 6 million users out there Facebook could have potentially made millions of dollars on this deal (even by just charging something nominal like a one-time charge of $10/ a name (in the US- adjusted to in other parts of the world, or perhaps free in some countries)). Surely, charging a nominal fee like this wouldn’t have been an issue to a large number of users, especially since the service is free. At the very least, Facebook should have charged corporations for vanity plates. Even this would have made the company thousands (if not millions) of dollars. I personally think Facebook made a huge mistake and its only a matter of time until Facebook executives started kicking themselves in the butt for passing up this great opportunity to monetize.