http://tivistar.blogspot.com/

Chris Dixon has some great insight here: http://cdixon.org/2010/05/15/facebook-is-about-to-try-to-dominate-display-ads-the-way-google-dominates-text-ads/…

And as you probably know, Google did disclose the revshare in the meanwhile: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-rev…

Facebook have created a PR catastrophe recently on privacy and it is pure greed and lack of respect for us d**b f**ks (whose content and support have created the company) that should further discourage any decent upstanding brand from going anywhere near Facebook.

Facebook's behaviour is cheap and so therefore will be its ad base… It's still just a digital graffiti wall you know… who really wants to advertise next to that?

And the number of advertisers have 4x'ed in one year (though I bet the majority of these are SMBs): http://gigaom.com/2010/06/02/facebook-advertise…

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I like this point of view and have a slightly different one. I believe the local ad opportunity is more immediate and directly addressable for Facebook than the branding dollars. The large advertisers spending 500k daily on MySpace and YouTube are looking for massive distribution and home page take overs on a consistent quality traffic base. The Facebook publishing network, or AdSense equivalent, might be able to offer marginally better targeting, but won't command the large CPMs of the customized destination sites.

Here's my argument for Facebook's local opportunity: http://expostfacto.posterous.com/facebooks-loca…

Obviously, few people are going to be willing to give you their credit card data and so many people have tried to build out compelling value-props to convince you… (Mint < 1M users, Blippy ~ 20K users, etc…) But harvesting intent via the "Like" button or building out a taste-graph really just seems like an easy-to-access proxy for actual spending.

http://www.milabra.com/

BTW Colgate.

As pointed out by commenters, you’d rather focus your attention on non-fans already, ie. negative targeting, something that Facebook already does in the NewsFeed; actually, you’d rather focus on Friends of fans, that can convince you to accompany them to see Avatar: having their name & pic appear on the ad itself was too much, but targeting Friends of fans with an ad saying how many friends are already member, and showing a preview of the Community page with a mouse over (with the name & pic of your Friends that are members) conveniently above the fold… that’s more like it. Fairly enough to make that 1% click-through rate become a significantly higher Fan-rate without interrupting their navigation.

More interesting, Facebook could infer how many exposures are necessary to reach that engagement, and price Display similarly to CPC, as a share of the final margin, not rat-race bottom prices.

On a related note: that could threaten Hunch.com (or make it a fantastic business partner); I’m not sure you’d be confortable with having that conversation in public, but I’d love to listen to that.

I just don’t understand why brand advertisers should focus on click. It’s an irrelevant metric to measure intent and notoriety, especially for off-line advertisers.

In the end, it’s a good think that Google eventually finds a great competitor for on-line advertising.

Oops, y’all pushed me (and many of my friends) too far. Good luck ever luring us back.

And regardless of whether you classify “content network” text ads as intent generating or harvesting (I’d argue that Adsense ads have been somewhere in between), the fact is that the context of the state of mind of the user is much more important than anything else.

Given that Adsense has only a fraction of the profitability of Adwords for Google, it stands to reason that Facebook is unlikely to reach Google’s numbers.

Social search might do it, but then it is not really proven yet that people really want social search. Especially if we only assume input from one’s FB social graph, at a mode of 100 friends or so the sample size may simply be too small

(vs. say Twitter where at least people routinely have up to thousands of followers/friends, but where we currently cannot search over just their updates – except through indirect, hackish work-arounds).

This justification requires that the user’s behavior is tracked as far into history as possible.

The race is on to get a single companies cookie into as many users and sites on the web as possible.

Google has the adsense cookie on a ton of sites already and is also planning to become the aggregator of ad networks, as the industry becomes fragmented. http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-certified-ad-networks-now.html

Facebook and Twitter need their code on as many sites as possible/ The “like” information is just a benefit for the site installing the code. It would improve their pageviews by recommending “liked” pages to friends of the user. Ex: CNN for facebook and NYtimes for Twitter.

The problem is not around offering the right ad a user, it can be done using previous click behavior of users. Its about justifying the ad spend for an advertiser.

Is this really an environment they can IPO in? Are their revenues high enough to support an IPO of this magnitude?

Why are they continuing to alienate customers by altering the service at such a rapid pace? It’s causing them more PR and customer service issues than they ought to have.

Who will they market the shares to?

I like how this cuts to the heart of it. What scares me the most, which is just passingly mentioned, is that we are going to have to re-align our web browsing habits with the ever-changing privacy structures. I w-a-n-t to like The Departed & perhaps also Marty Scorsese, but do I want to tell WB that ‘hey, i have another $15 in my hand for another movie you think i should now go watch’. The answer seems unclear to me right now. They might know enough about me to give me an intelligent suggestion. Somehow, Hunch seems to be somewhere in the middle there. Your Twitter_app was mindblowingly accurate.

For now, I am just going more private than ever before. I feel I am going to sit on the not-so-cool-kids lunch table away from Mark and his crew just cause in this high school I don’t want everybody to know my business.

I figure in 5 years this whole conversation is moot. Search and display will largely merge into one over time and Google probably still dominates.

Time spent on Facebook is like driving down the highway aimlessly with your friends in a convertible. You might see some billboards – but your main activity has nothing to do with the ads you might see on the billboards along the way.

Time spent with Google is riding in the back of a blacked out SUV to the mall. You don’t see much of the world around you – but you get where you need to go.

As search results become more visual the need to do more display advertising wanes. Sure, Facebook will gererate a lot of $ and profit in the display game – because display ads or brand advertising always goes where the eyeballs are and then buys bulk eyeballs at the lowest CPM possible. Targeting a more qualified set of eyeballs helps but as mentioned already in the comments – only really helps if you can say for sure that the brand advertising led to intent. (Thus couponing!)

Facebook have created a PR catastrophe recently on privacy and it is pure greed and lack of respect for us d**b f**ks (whose content and support have created the company) that should further discourage any decent upstanding brand from going anywhere near Facebook.

Facebook’s behaviour is cheap and so therefore will be its ad base… It’s still just a digital graffiti wall you know… who really wants to advertise next to that?