Facebook Advertisers More Than Triple

23 06 2009

Facebook said the number of advertisers using the facebook ad self-serve advertising platform has more than tripled in the last year. This is no surprise, but its nice to put a number on the growth – this way we can watch the pace it continues to grow at.  The way i see it, its still real early on – and you have allot of small and mid-size business starting to use facebook ads .

What i find interesting is how long it will take the large business (and their agencies) to get in the game. This is the exact thing that happened with google’s adwords ad product – early on it was affiliate marketers and small business. But over time the big brands understood they had to be at the top of the results for their key terms – and now pay through the roof to stay there.

How long do you think it will take for facebook ads to become a must online ad buy like adwords? What do u think???

Last thought… if facebook really wanted to grow the ad platform they would release facebook ad api ASAP!

~FBADS





CEO Confrims Facebook Ad Network.

20 05 2009

I  have been saying it over and over again on this blog, but now you get it straight from the horses’ mouth.  SAI has some nice “nuggets” from Zukerberg’s talk at  Reuters Global Tech Summit.

On the future of the facebook ad network, Mark Zuckerberg is quoted saying:

“You can see over time us wanting to offer more ways for people to monetize their site and help out with that, and it could be a pretty natural extension for us to do something with ads or a number of other things that we’ve considered”

You can call facebook  allot of different things today, but one day soon they will be referred exclusively as an “advertising business” (just like google :)

~FBADS





Did Facebook just open the floodgates (for more ad impressions)?

19 05 2009

Facebook OpenID & GoogleWow, Facebook really knows how to stay in the news. Hey i love it, bec i get to spin everything and hatch my (sometime crazy) theories on the future of the fb ad platform.

About a month ago facebook told us that they will soon let users sign up & login to the site via OpenID. And now they do! While this is obviously the beginning of a full rollout – they have integrated and made live the open id support with Gmail. Starting today you can go to facebook and set up a new account with your gmail account.

There is a great write up on the announcement over at InsideFacebook – check it out.

So what does this mean? For Facebook? For Facebook Ads?

Its means that the one internet company growing like a weed on A-Rod’s steroids is facebook – and now they are putting the pieces in place to let anyone come with any sort of online profile (OpenID will be everywhere in a few years) and signup / login in seconds. Yep, so the weed grows even faster / bigger / stronger.

Now on the Ads side they are just shoring up more and more users that = more and more impressions. More impressions, means more data, more data means better targeting and better targeting  = better monetization  & ad performance.

Oh and pls dont tell me how not everything facebook does is about thier ad product. Ads are how they plan on funding Mr Zuckerberg’s vision of this next gen social graph / social app.  And guess what, its working – Techcrunch is reporting that facebook turned down a VC round at 8 billion valuation & there are rumors that they will do 550 million revenue in 2009. Guess what is generating that 550 million dollars – thats right, the ad product. enough said…

Another smart move by facebook. Im getting used to it ;)

~FBADS





Something facebook ads needs to solve that google never had to.

18 05 2009

I like to think about the Facebook Ads program as an baby adwords. It has a ton of potential  (just like adwords did when it launched), and looks like it will be one of the few “must buy online ads” (which probably only has 1 player currently – adwords, Goto then Overture and then Yahoo Search Marketing might have been in this list in the past but is not anymore).

That brings me to the post title; Something facebook ads needs to solve that google never had to.

First off, remember that 100% of facebook ads rely on something that facebook knows about the targeted users. From geography, to interest, to age etc – they have to run the magic formula using that data and post the (hopefully) targeted ads.

The Adwords search program is different where the ads are showing only showing when the user is actively pursuing the targeted keyword, and then the ad can only shown next to other links, ads etc  and not have to worry about the ads showing next to anything other than some misspellings. Now i know that a large part of adwords is adsense where advertisers target contextually relevant content to show ads.  While it makes alot more sense to compare facebook ads to adsense than the adwords search-only network — google is a “must ad buy” bec if a company is worried about where and how the ads will show up, then can opt out of the adsense network and still pay google a ton of money for web advertising. Facebook doesnt have that option and needs to figure it out.

The funny part, this apparently was something that plagued the myspace ad program that they subsequently fixed.

the post was prompted when i can across this article: Facebook warned to improve online advertising

here is the text from the article:

Advertising agencies have pointed out that marketing material is appearing in inappropriate places on the website.

The claim follows a news report from New Media Age that Tesco has stopped advertising on Facebook after its marketing material was found alongside groups which supported holocaust denial.

Commenting on the misplaced marketing, a Tesco spokesperson told the news provider: “It´s an extremely offensive group and we wouldn´t want to be associated with it.”

Guy Phillipson, chief executive officer of the Internet Advertising Bureau, said: “Facebook should take the lead from MySpace. It should have people or technology to ensure advertisers can exclude ads from offensive groups.”

Facebook said that it gives advertisers the tools to control where their marketing material appears and this includes the ability to exclude them from particular groups.

Meanwhile, according to Reuters, more than 200 million Facebook passwords have been stolen by phishers and spokesperson for the website Barry Schnitt said the company was in the process of cleaning up from the attack.

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Let me know what you think, pls weigh in with your thoughts in the comments.

~FBADS








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