Eventually search engines found the right balance between commerce, control and user-friendliness, a balance that I believe social media sites will eventually strike.

There will be some false starts to be sure but there is much to be gained for all parties --marketers, social media platforms, and users -- in getting the balance right.

The big takeaways from this are data and targeting as the hook for marketers and the need to integrate the paid marketing offerings into the user experience natively.

This doesn't mean that social media platforms simply need to copy the search engine's monetization systems. Its going to be more complicated than that. But there are plenty of parallels between search and social media, including that they drive traffic very effectively.

And studying the lessons of the fits and starts that search went through from its early days in the mid 90s to the time when overture finally figured it out and google perfected it in the early part of this decade is a really useful exercise for everyone seeking to monetize social media.