ads

A few days ago Nick O’Neill posted on AllFacebook about some ad numbers that Justin Smith came up with regarding Facebook CPMs.

Basically, the numbers are low and probably going to get lower. This gets at an issue that I’ve been harping on for some time (although, unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the post that best expresses it): the best approach to Facebook applications is not as a business in and of itself (make apps, then sell ads), but as tool to reach a social media audience with your brand.

If social media were a movie theater, Facebook apps would be the previews, not the feature presentation.

The real winners in the Facebook app space are the companies that take a chunk of their ad budget and dedicate it to creating and maintaining an engaging, well-branded application, not those who try to use an application as a vehicle for making money.

I’m increasingly convinced that social media is a “no-buy, no-sell” zone in a lot of people’s minds. What you really want to do is build relationships in social media. You can sell them somewhere else when the time and place are right.

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Let me preface this post by pointing out that Weblo violates the Facebook Terms of Service. If you decide to try it on for size, I will point and laugh at you if Facebook disables your profile.

In Bits today Louise Story writes about Weblo’s growing presence on Facebook profiles:

More than 1,500 Facebook users have started placing advertisements on their own profile pages — despite the social networking site’s rule against such ads.

Visitors to Weblo’s site will see that they can “earn money from your popularity online.” Weblo estimates people’s advertising value based on variables like how many friends they have in their social networks, and, thus, how many people will likely see ads on their pages.

Facebook does not allow users to sell ads on their profile pages. Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, told me on Nov. 6 that is because Facebook does not want people’s profile pages to become cluttered.

Don’t want sites to become cluttered, eh? A likely story…

Although one of the things I *do* like about Facebook, especially over MySpace, is the way they’ve kept the interface clean and their conventions consistent, I have to admit that Weblo has a point.

My Facebook profile is something that I have created. Why shouldn’t I be given the option to monetize it?

Personally, I woulnd’t. I don’t have ads on my personal blog. If I could take the existing ads out of my Facebook profile I would do that too. I don’t like the look of it, and I don’t think my friends want to see ads on my profile (because let’s face it, that’s whose seeing the ads you put up — it’s the digital equivalent of having a sponsored birthday party with close friends and family).

But I don’t see why that shouldn’t be a choice.

Ruslan over at AbuZant Web Goodies has picked apart the code on Facebook’s new pages service to see exactly what they’re using to target the new social ads.

Apparently he downloaded the javascript file that delineates the targeting variables (he posted the code in his post, but it’s long and scary looking, so I opted not to re-post it here). He sums up, however, that:

They are targeting the using “at least” information about:

* Your political view
* Your sex
* Your age
* Marital status
* Country, City and/or Region
* Education Status
* Workplace

This is really not that much of a surprise. Part of the reason everyone has been so interested in this new ad system is that it can rely on a wealth of information that simply isn’t available to services like adSense.

In a practical sense, I’d say don’t upload any personal information to Facebook that you don’t want used by Facebook to try to target ads.

But in a realistic sense, is it a problem that Facebook has all of this personal data, and is using it to target ads? Certainly if the ads are annoying or useless. But what if the ads are really really good? In other words, at what point do you stop trading privacy for relevant advertising?

ps. It’s not fair to say there shouldn’t be ads. If that’s the case, then maybe the question is “how much would you pay per month to use Facebook?”

As expected, Google has announced a set of common APIs for creating applications that will work on multiple networks. Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle have all agreed to participate as partners with Google in this initiative.

We old timers have been through this before, back when Microsoft created a platform that embraced the same HTML that Netscape Navigator could read, but offered “new functionality.”

Wikipedia offers a three point analysis of what might be in store for Facebook:

“1. Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
2. Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the ’simple’ standard.
3. Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions .”

As Michael Arrington says: “The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook.”

What’s really interesting is that one of the most visible partners in this effort is none other than Ning, the network led by Marc Andreesen, the cofounder of Netscape. Considering Facebook’s close alliance with Microsoft, there is no shortage of irony here.

I realize that the trickiest part of Facebook’s new “flyers pro” advertising feature might simply be finding it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the sweet baritone of my voice for a few minutes while I walk you through the process of buying one.

Actually my voice sounds a bit odd, but that’s because my mic gain was turned down pretty low and I had to talk extra loud to make it work right.

Any flyers you buy show up in the Facebook lefthand sidebar. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, log in and check the left under the navigation. That’s where they go.

I’ve also uploaded the video to our WCF group on Facebook (this is Revver, since I can’t embed FB video elsewhere).