2 Comments »Soon after the Facebook platform launched last year, there was an influx of advertising networks racing to fill the new inventory provided by applications. These networks became the primary source of advertising revenue for most of the applications and while there have been monetization partnerships with outside vendors, most of the advertising still comes from third parties.
This afternoon I was looking at an application and saw the ad pictured below. The ad says “You Are Dumb”. Now while the accuracy of the advertisement may be unproven, the ad itself is pretty stupid. So far there appears to be no large brands that are advertising via the third parties without some sort of application tie in which presents a large problem for these ad networks.
If all these ad networks provide is advertising for other applications, how large can they really get? There is also the issue of Facebook competing directly with the advertisers for large advertisement deals. As Ross Levinsohn, former CEO of Fox Interactive told Adage, “There isn’t enough advertising to support all those features, and in compression times, advertisers tend to flock to safe names and sites that have real traction.”
There’s always space for bottom of the barrel advertising, but when it comes to attracting the high CPMs, most of the third-party ad networks (if not all of them) are struggling to come up with solutions. As such, we see that 18 months after the launch of the platform, there are still ads like the one below. At the same time, it appears that there has been a slight improvement in the quality of ads on Facebook.
Unfortunately for Facebook, as I wrote earlier this week, there is still not enough good inventory on Facebook. What do you think the future of 3rd party ad networks on Facebook holds?
With regard to that particular ad, I might take the contrarian position that it’s an example of qualifying your clickthroughs to the extreme. Since the creator of that ad is paying per click, they’re really only getting clicks from people who want to be compared to their friends *so badly* that they’re willing to sustain verbal abuse just to do so. (I doubt that much thought went into the ad, though)
On the broader subject of 3rd party ad networks advertising apps… What’s interesting about these ad networks is that they are better targeted than any Social Ad you could ever concoct. Why? Because whatever targeting you select for a Social Ad, it’s really just a poor approximation for your true target: *people who use apps* (with the implication that they might want to try yours). These 3rd party ad networks are a win for app developers for that reason: only people who are already using applications are ever going to see them…. so you’re not wasting PPC dollars on other users who just don’t use apps, period.
I was going to issue a shout out last night asking how to bury or block YOU ARE DUMB ad. I work with a green netbook & find destructive ads/apps a total show stopper. I believe in contributing to social sites whether my input is appreciated or not. Hopefully more towards being useful for the community. I was updating living social when I noticed ads/apps were popping up & causing me to enter comments on the wrong item. I have a very small screen to work with & very little time to slow down. In short, i stopped using these sites and just wait for a well structured site to come along for me to work with.