Facebook’s Fan-sumer advertising system announcement and MySpace’s new self-serve ads

Both of the Social Network behemoth’s made advertising announcements today, and from what I can tell, they went in completely different directions. I can’t do a whole lot better than point you first to the TechCrunch liveblogging of the Facebook announcement, and second to Jeremiah’s breakdown of the two new services.

OK, so now you’re caught up.

Based only on those two posts (since that’s currently all I know about these new ad systems), I’d say Facebook has a better concept going forward. It sounds somewhat like a large-scale affiliate program with a set of Groucho glasses on, which is not really a bad way to go.

Facebook has been right to try to identify what can drive sales inside a social network, and look to leverage that rather than to just increase the real estate given to “traditional” ads.

I’m also skeptical of the business profile pages. I don’t think they’re going to be a big hit. It’s good that businesses will finally have a real home on Facebook, but I’m not sure that it brings a lot of value to the network, or for that matter, more value to the business than having your employees on as individual people.

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