ClickZ published a report today which suggests Facebook received a whopping $467,000 from the Obama campaign, “$370,000 of which was spent in September alone.” That’s a more than impressive statistic considering that the campaign spent $8 million in total online. Perhaps it has something to do with Chris Hughes who was a co-Founder of Facebook and left to join the Obama campaign?
There’s no way to determine why so much was spent on Facebook but in comparison, only $11,500 was spent on MySpace before it disappeared from their budget. I’ve posted numerous times about the merging of politics and social networks, and the new reports are a testament to how much influence social networks really have from a monetary standpoint.
While search continues to attract the lion’s share of online ad spend, social networks are obviously becoming a large component of online ad expenditures. It’s debatable as to whether or not social networks will become as large as search but Mark Zuckerberg did at least imply that there is the potential for Facebook’s ads to be extended to the general web.
If Facebook Connect is successful, the extension of Facebook ads to the general web could have significant implications. Anyways, back to politics. When it comes to social networks, Facebook was clearly one of the clear winners for the Presidential campaign. While we don’t know how much was allocated by the McCain campaign, we’re guessing that social network ad expenditures overall were much lower than Obama’s.
This is great news for Facebook as they work to integrate politics and connecting.
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This is great analysis Nick!
Do you have other examples/numbers for a typical month for a Facebook campaign spend from a big brand?
Comment by Sam — November 6, 2008 @ 6:07 pm
Shows the Obama campaign knows what they are doing online. They utilized all the right tools from ustream to twitter, and facebook. Even their website was more attractive and now they hopped on change.gov. Oh yeh, he's also for net neutrality. I'm loving that Obama's seemed to be tuned in with technology.
Comment by mojaam — November 6, 2008 @ 6:13 pm
This blog, instead of a blog about Facebook, is an infomercial for Facebook, 24/7. $500k from a campaign that spent $700 million? That's huge? 0.07% of his fundraising? That's what I would call…
Nothing.
Sounds more like an experiment than anything. Especially since 80% was spent in September… leaving only 20% or so for October–the entire month preceding the election.
Comment by Anonymous — November 6, 2008 @ 11:08 pm