Comments on: Microsoft loves Facebook

By: JoeDuck

JoeDuck — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:25:09 +0000

FG I don’t know the specifics at Facebook, but the short answer I think is that they are planning to do a lot more targeting than they do now. They probably do some geographic and subject targeting now – I’ll try to look for that next time I’m there though that is not often. Note that for things like an iPhone or Sprint Cellular or SONY or other globally relevant products you really don’t need to target – SPRINT will want to reach every single person on Facebook to promote cell phones. Conversion on this type of campaign is obviously much lower than if you advertised at a cell phone blog, but Facebook offers spectacular “reach”.

One of the reasons Social Networks are so big is that theoretically they’ll be able to do very specific targeting of ads to individuals since they have your information already. I don’t think there is much of this now, although Google gmail is working with this concept by pumping out “relevant” ads into panels that surround the email reader. I think the subject of the emails it used to target those ads, which lead to Steve Ballmer saying that MSN does not read people’s email like google.

What is done now is targeting by niches, geography, and many other factors seem as relevant.

By: FoolsGold

FoolsGold — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:45:03 +0000

Advertizing revenue?

When you say advertising revenue, is this derived from ads that are unique to its being a social networking site so that some member of the site who is a photographer will see an ad for film or is it simply that “n” number of people who sign onto the heavily trafficked site see ads some of which happen to be for film even if the site visitors are not photographers and do not post about photography?

Are the ads ‘localized’ by geography? Would a resident of Miami Beach see an ad for: Alaskan Igloos? Florida Land? Miami Nightclubs?

If someone registers and posts a great deal about “hitting the sack” does he see ads for burlap sacks?

By: JoeDuck

JoeDuck — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:02:57 +0000

FG the revenues are advertising, and I think half are from a running ad contract with Microsoft which is why some have suggested Facebook is wildly overvalued – without that ad contract they’d be making even less from the basic Facebook advertising, which appears to convert to business in an inferior way to seach ads. My feeling is that search and social network advertising is overrated enough that these deals will go down as mistakes. That said, I though Myspace was overvalued when Fox spent a paltry 650,000,000 for the whole thing when it was much bigger than Facebook is now.

By: Microsoft and Facebook up a tree

Microsoft and Facebook up a tree — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:44:52 +0000

[...] finds that money in his couch every spring cleaning. I was going to write something longer, but Joe Duck, kinda hit a lot of what I was going to say. But I still have some more words to [...]

By: FoolsGold

FoolsGold — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 09:46:00 +0000

I’m not listed in Facebook or MySpace or any of that stuff so I don’t really know how they operate but when one speaks of ‘Facebook revenues’ just what are such revenues derived from: membership fees, advertising revenues?