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Facebook’s Aging: For all the consternation about Facebook growth, the social network giant is in a pole position to be the next great Internet giant. EMarketer has some interesting stats about the breadth of its reach, pointing out how older users are increasing their activity on the platform. Those age 55 and over are now 43 percent of the site’s users, compared with just 24 percent in September 2010. EMarketer
More Bad Press for Groupon: Wow, TechCrunch really has something against Groupon. The tech site continues its series of posts slamming the company with one quoting an unnamed former employee calling out “high-pressure” sales tactics at the company. These posts might end up saying more about TechCrunch than Groupon. Groupon is a company in the grubby business of direct ad sales on the local level. It’s notoriously difficult and not very glamorous. Silicon Valley, despite praising Groupon, doesn’t fully get sale-driven business models. TechCrunch
YouTube’s Ad Problems: Digiday has covered the problems with brands finding themselves adjacent to bad content on YouTube. An Ad Age post picks up on this theme by weighing in against the prevalence of racist language in comments on the site. Zennie Abraham, a member of YouTube’s publisher program, believes the site should censor the use of “the N word” out of comments. No matter what, it’s yet another risk for advertisers. AdAge
The Upside of Social Networking: It turns out Facebook users are more trusting than the overall population. That’s one of the findings of a Pew survey of social networkers. Frequent users of the site are 43 percent more likely to find people generally trustworthy. It will be interesting to see how this spills into overall society as Facebook becomes more embedded in everyday life. Pew
Cartoon of the Day: AdExchanger pretty much sums up the Google-Admeld deal — in a cartoon. It’s a weekly feature of the site. This week’s shows Admeld’s CEO Michael Barrett breaking through the (in)famous Luma Partners slide of the mess of ad-tech companies. The unasked question is what’s going to happen to those unlucky companies that, unlike Admeld, don’t find a generous buyer. AdExchanger
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