The change of Owen Van Natta from chief operating officer of Facebook to “chief revenue officer and vice president of operations,” brings with it some changes at the social networking site.
While the company claims it's not a demotion, it's hard to believe it's not connected to the recent fiasco surrounding a number of companies and the British government dropping advertising on the site.
When I heard Van Natta say about those circumstances that "We weren't entirely prepared for it or we would have taken action to try to resolve it before it even got to the press," I said at the time is sounded like somewhat of "an odd statement to me."
The reason I mentioned was the long-term concerns of advertisers putting their 
offerings next to user-generated content being a reality for at least a couple years. To be caught off guard didn't sound good for Van Natta to say. It revealed the company wasn't focusing on important issues, the reason they were caught off guard.
To say Van Natta now being one of six people sharing power is not a demotion is disingenuous at best. A week after the problems happened he is no longer COO of the company. I guess you can call it whatever you like. This type of power sharing doesn't usually have a long-term success rate. We'll see if Facebook can beat the odds.
What's important in this to me is it shows there are some underlying weaknesses in the company that have to be addressed, and evidently this was a step toward that very purpose.
With pricing for ads on social networking sites being very low in contrast to web portals, they can't afford to make too many huge mistakes before it makes a huge dent in earnings, and even larger, skittish companies not only leave the site, but refuse to advertise in the first place.
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