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Facebook and advertising - where to?

Posted on November 29th, 2007 in Deals and mergers, Advertising, Social networking sites by admin

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It seems that there is considerable competition between Facebook and Google of late, with the two falling over themselves to sign up the best and the brightest in terms of developer talent, and the two virtually neck and neck in terms of the online advertising race. And when it comes down to it, it seems that it is Facebook that can’t really do without Google, indeed Facebook is now advertising on Google - to get advertising.

Facebook will soon be announcing that some of their pages that don’t require login will become indexable by search engines such as Google, so information that normally you would have to be logged in to get, will now become more publicly available. This follows on from the fact that recently Facebook launched a public listings search, whereby anyone can now search for a specific person.

It is argued by some that social networking sites, though extremely popular, have an inherent difficulty in making money, people don’t really go to them to search for information or look at ads, but to communicate with other users, so Facebook is perhaps having to work hard to monetize the site effectively.

Back in the summer Facebook signed an advertising deal with Microsoft to put Microsoft adCenter sponsored links and other ads on the Facebook site, right through to 2009. This news raised eyebrows because it was Microsoft that was chosen for the ad deal and not Google, which is surprising given that Google has been going all out for the big advertising deals, even offering 90% or more of total revenue to certain big name partners, such as AOL and Ask.

So what does the future hold for Facebook in terms of its relationship with Google? Let’s see.

Social Ads - the next move from Facebook

Posted on November 4th, 2007 in Advertising, Social networking sites, Business Software, E-Commerce by admin

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While we wonder if Facebook will join OpenSocial, it seems that Facebook has other things on its plate. Next week Facebook will be launching its Social Ads advertising service, which takes the Facebook ads outside the social network, and allows third party sites to run them. Interesting. It’s Facebook’s very own version of Google Adsense, and will take Facebook and Google into an even more competitive position vis-a-vis one another.

The whole thing will not actually be unveiled until November 6th, but it looks like it will work in a similar way to AdSense, but the ads will be targeted to Facebook members profile data, and interests. This will be done, surprise, surprise, via cookies which will identify the members later when they visit other sites hosting Social Ads.

Facebook has already had a go at targeting ads on its own site, by means of its Facebook Flyers program, using demographic and psychographic data gleaned from members’ profiles. With Social Ads, that targeting will be extended right across the web.

The only glitch in all of this is that the targeting will only work for Facebook members, who are still not a major proportion of all web users, despite the fact that Facebook has grown so dramatically in membership.

There is also some talk that Facebook will be targeting ads according to who networks with who on the site, but this remains to be seen. Meanwhile industry pundits are waiting for November 6th to see what lies in store on the Facebook scene.