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Hey Mark…Where Are The Ads?
Back in December I provided results from advertising on Facebook. While the results weren’t great and the company billed me just over $1 last month, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says the company, “…could not be doing better financially”.
Over the past week companies including Seesmic have launched desktop applications which allow you to access your Facebook “stream” on your desktop without ever visiting the facebook.com website. Steven Hodson has a good overview of the new Seesmic application.
These new applications are similar to the crop of Twitter applications that allow you to interact with the service “off-site”. Most power users appear to use an off-site service when interacting with Twitter. I can only assume we will see the same pattern with Facebook and off-site interaction. I am not sold that these desktop applications have a chance to actually be solid revenue generators but we will leave that discussion for another day.
My question to Facebook is…where are my ads within these new desktop applications? Are they sent as a package with the feed to the desktop applications? If advertising is the model that Facebook intends to use going forward, I would have thought ads would be included in the desktop stream from day 1. I will admit that I haven’t downloaded the Seesmic desktop application but in all of the reviews I have read, there has been no mention of advertising within the stream.
Assuming ads are not currently part of the desktop applications, when they add them, will we see the same sort of backlash that Facebook has experienced with Beacon and more recently with the terms of service changes? The numbers of Facebook users using the desktop applications is low today and will be for the short-term but as that number grows (especially with power users), Facebook will be forced to push out more ads into the stream – or they risk losing the $1 that I paid them last month since users will never have the chance to engage with my ad unit.
[...] stream, you have to believe that Twitter and Facebook won’t be far behind. Last week I asked Mark Zuckerberg why he allows Facebook users to use desktop tools without ads. centernetwork257:http://www.centernetworks.com/friendfeed-ads [...]
Allen,
I totally agree with what you’re driving at here. And I totally think that the application developers are missing out on a huge monetization strategy. I think that Facebook is going to have to rethink at least one of the developer rules as it relates to the stream (or let the loophole that I can imagine slide through).
Ads on the desktop client are something we might view as desirable if they’re done tastefully and give us back some benefit. The thing about the desktop clients like PeopleBrowsr, Tweetdeck, and Seesmic is that they allow for direct targeting of the ads. This is likely to result in higher clickthroughs and much higher conversions. I posted about this on Monday this week: http://guruvan.gurus.net/techbiz/thars-gold-thar-streams
I don’t know that it’s really Facebook’s decision that there are no ads in these desktop clients. As I read it only one suggestion in my post (discounts for posting a Wall Story) are disallowed by Facebook’s developer rules. I still think that the opportunity for individual, behavioral targeting via multi-network clients is immense.
And Jeff, The power users are actually likely to be the ones who click on the actually targeted ads first. Show me an ad that speaks directly to me, and has exactly what I want, and I’ll click on it. You may be correct that the casual users are the ones to click on the average current Facebook ads, like the ones for the stupid IQ quizzes. But those aren’t targeted. If they were, I would NEVER see them.
Ads? We don’t need no stinkin’ ads…
Facebook, Twitter, et. al. want to encourage their power users to stick around because they generate 80% of the content. Inversely, it’s the casual users who are most likely to use the web to interact (not the desktop app) and are also more likely to click on the ads (power users ignore them). So give the power users a nice, clean, ad-free environment to do their power-user thing in, and show ads to the casual (i.e. lazy) users who are more inclined to click on adverts anyway. It’s a win for everyone, and just maybe why ads on the desktop client don’t really matter.