Social Media: Facebook Opens the Door Wider to Layering Ads
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Written By Noah Mallin | April 27, 2009 | Share This
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One of the little-mentioned facets of Twitter’s hardcore third-party app users are the possibilities this opens for others to monetize the platform. Sites such as Friend or Follow, which shows you users who aren’t following you back, has ads on their results pages. Granted this is the exception to the rule and the ads are anything but targeted but once you have access to users streams can targeting be far behind? Considering that a large chunk of active Twitter users never access the service from the homepage, third-party apps like TweetDeck have a sizable audience - and there’s no indication that they’d have to share any revenue from advertising.
Now Facebook is taking another page out of the Twitter playbook by launching their Open Stream API, basically opening up Facebook streams (what most people call updates) to third party developers. There is a hitch though – here’s how Facebook put it on their developer’s blog: “Before you can interact with a user’s stream, the user needs to grant your application either or both of these extended permissions: publish_streamread_stream, depending upon what you plan to do.”
This is a major encumbrance in that people have to agree to have their stream (ie their updates) read by the application. It remains to be seen whether any third-party will be able to muster a sizable group willing to do so on Facebook.
Still, the concept does open up the potential for ad layering on a much larger platform than Twitter currently has. In fact it’s already happening on Facebook, only on fan pages rather than on third-party apps. Us Weekly’s fanpage is currently sponsored by insurance company State Farm and the company who came up with the technology to do so is planning on more of these. In theory sponsoring the right fan page can help to target your demo audience, though I think it’s arguable whether these ads have any more impact than a typical display campaign. More to the point, are they really making use of the unique attributes of Facebook’s platform?
Therein lies the rub, as one masseuse said to the other. All of these ads will just seem like clutter unless they are relevant to users and fit organically with the platforms they are on.
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Topics: Advertising: Online, Facebook, Social Media, Twitter |
I agree.yah!