Everywhere on facebook at least in canada they are running nothing but social ads. It used to be only 1 ad per page but now its three of them. I’ve long said that text ads and banner ads will be dead as a business model. The only reason that text ads are more profitable than banner ads is because you can promote 4 products in a 728*90 space instead of 1 product being promoted by a banner. I figured out years ago as did many people that sticking pictures next to text ads greatly increases CTR and revenue. So you get the benfits of a banner ad, with the ability to promote multipul products at once.
I think facebooks Social ads if syndicated like adsense will be the future of online advertising. Every single ad on facebook is an ad for a local restaurant or business. In Canada facebook owns local advertising in a way no other company has ever come close to.
November 23, 2008 at 3:27 pm |
Marcus,
You said, “I’ve long said that text ads and banner ads will be dead as a business model.”
How does your model differ, then?
Sam
November 23, 2008 at 6:05 pm |
I ment in the form they currently exist. Slap some images next to current text ads and they will out monetize both banner ads and text link only ads.
November 23, 2008 at 8:10 pm |
Markus I know your private and never talk about how much money you are spending on promotion and such but you seem to be using facebook applications to drive traffic to your site, mainly “Are You INterested” and I am guessing that your spending at least $30-40k a month there alone…is organic search no longer working for POF?
Just curious and while you never talk about it I am guessing you have been spending a lot of money on marketing for years…and rightly so of course
Facebook seems to be the future of online dating as well perhaps
November 23, 2008 at 8:16 pm |
I wasn’t even aware my ads were showing there. My marketing budget in canada hasn’t exceeded $1000/month in years.
November 23, 2008 at 8:39 pm |
ADAPT
I have emailed you at plentyoffish a game changing idea which i think you will find intriguing-I would appreciate your oppinion-Dean
November 24, 2008 at 7:15 am |
I wonder if ad blindness may eventually cause the images next to the text ads to be of little help. When people are already on the site they want to be on–such as a social network, where they can hang out for hours–it can be very difficult to kick them off. It requires finding out what it is they are looking for and finding a way to advertise it. Otherwise many people may hardly notice the ad, and those who do don’t may not care. Even with a picture.
November 24, 2008 at 7:50 am |
Greetings Markus,
I actually introduced something like this years ago for a performance marketing network in germany. now we are doing the same thing at adcloud.net, building an open platform/exchange to allow anyone to run campaigns and create placements within the network.
We really started doing this ages ago for performance reasons and yes it shows. you see one of our ads (labled Ormigo, changing the brand now, never mind
) here for example: http://www.rp-online.de/public/article/politik/deutschland/641994/Merkels-Woche-der-Wahrheit.html
We are mostly advertising in content and it is currently limited for germany, but the platform is internationalized internally and we are talking to some international players. If you have some german traffic it might be worth a try.
Greetings from cologne,
Oliver
November 25, 2008 at 12:07 am |
Very interesting post, I personally feel rich multi-media advertising and cell phone advertising is going to be the future of internet advertising.
Look at the iPhone, for example, it basically just opened the worlds eyes to what cell phone advertising is really about. My one site is doing over 2,000,000 impressions per day, just on users iPhones and this type of advertising has not really gained any traction in the market place.
November 25, 2008 at 6:35 pm |
both facebook and myspace are tough to monetize, no matter what kind of ads they display and who displays those ads. The fact of the matter is that people on these sites are communicating with their friends and are not in a “transactional/search mode”. Based on that, you would expect ad rates to be low, but quite the opposite is true.
My experience with facebook has been horrible and I am sure they will burn through many advertisers with ridiculous CPC’s (granted, it’s targeted by gender and age but you can do the same on many other sites such as POF, with better results). At most I would do some branding on these sites but don’t expect people to click and buy your products there.
November 26, 2008 at 4:22 pm |
Marcus add Uzbekistan in country list on the site… please…
November 27, 2008 at 7:06 am |
Social ads can be more personalized than ads presented when the site knows nothing about you. If the ad helps you as a person and not just annoys you, you start occasionally looking at them instead of blocking them in your mind.
November 27, 2008 at 5:07 pm |
I agree with colnector… i dont think i have ever clicked on an add atleast not purposely, if i want to meet girls i’ll go to a dating site which i have googled and seems to be the best, if i want to buy martial arts gear i’ll go to some sites and compare. None of the adds consciously even get noticed (sometimes for a good looking woman!) And even if i notice them i know i wont click on it. Subconsciously yeah i might remember something (like the name or photo or what their selling but not all of three)-then our perifial filters will forget about them(perifial filters-ever bought a new car and suddenly seen loads of the same make where ever you go… or driven passed something for years and never noticed it was there even if it was huge or stood out loads, our perifial filter will filter out anything that isnt relevant or interesting to us.
(i dont think i have spelled perifial correctly!)
November 29, 2008 at 2:53 am |
>In Canada facebook owns local advertising in a way no other company has ever come close to.
Markus, could you please explain that (to someone who’s living in Italy and certainly does not see anything like that of FB yet)? Also, do you really think Facebook is in a better position than Google for local ads? Why so? Thanks
December 12, 2008 at 6:35 am |
December 17, 2008 at 2:33 am |
Actually there is a french canadian social network, only present in the quebec province, who are doing a lot better then facebook at selling publicity locally.
They basicly open regional social networking site and have a team in every city to run it, pretty much like radio stations network does. They are everywhere at big local events to promote it.
They have a bigger penetration then facebook in some regions, and they are pushing multiple millions of page viewed daily. A massive presence everywhere they are.
The network is called monlip
December 17, 2008 at 2:38 am |
Actually there are still graphical ads leading to outside websites in the events section and a couple other places.
December 21, 2008 at 3:31 am |
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