Dallas billionaire Mark Cuban is picking a fight with Facebook over the popular social-networking site's fees for businesses to promote their online posts.
The Dallas Mavericks owner is especially angry about recent changes that Facebook has made to its news feed, which he claims force businesses to pay to reach fans who have already "liked" their pages.
In a tweet, Cuban complained that Facebook wanted to charge him $3,000 to reach 1 million of the team's fans. The team's Facebook page has 2.3 million fans.
"FB is blowing it?" Cuban wrote. "This is the first step. The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or to new MySpace as primary site."
Facebook fired back: "There's a lot of misinformation going round ... To be clear -- we did not change news feed so we could charge to promote posts... ."
Cuban later told CNBC that the way Facebook is set up "is far from efficient and not in the best interest of brands."
He threatened to move the Mavs' postings to MySpace or Tumblr.
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But social media expert Mike Merrill said Facebook has little competition.
"For most people, statistics show that Facebook is the first site we look at in the morning and the last site we look at when we go to bed at night," Merrill said.
Merrill, marketing director for the online advertising company ReachLocal in Plano, Texas, said Facebook is clearly looking to make more money. Facebook's stock price is down nearly 50 percent since its debut in May.
"There's only so much content a consumer can see, so you're going to have to pay a premium to get in front of those consumers," he said.
