Pingar has been providing this service to content providers for some time now. Matching online ads to demographic profiles allows advertisers to map their offline and online campaigns. It also allows content providers to provide premium content at no user-pays cost. Monetising premium content by targeting registered user profiles, whilst protecting their personal privacy, makes sense.

This is clearly something that Facebook has recognised. Others will too.

couldn’t sell the data via permission email as we never had the volume to justify premium cpms.

so we played it another way and created a totally targeted ad model within espin, where teens use their attention as a form of currency to access premium upgrades. if you’re a 14 yr old boy from peoria, il interested in wii, with a facebook page and into emo music — that’s going to influence what advertising teasers are shown to you when you hit the premium upgrade machine. advertisers tell us the demo/profile they want to buy, and those are the only users that get exposed to their teasers.

where we play it a little diff from facebook is that we don’t host the “canvas” page, or the ad unit for that matter. we simply channel our audience on a cpa basis to other people’s pages (to an ad, to a site, to a facebook canvas page — it doesn’t matter to us, just as long as the teen chooses it).

we’ve seen facebook’s beta efforts through their survey model. and it’s pretty cool. what we do isn’t that far different except that because we’re so much smaller (2MM uniques/month, yes we’re still a fairly closed site), we rally our audience and then ship them off.

At 1.5 billion page views / day (according to zuckerberg at conference), that would equal $15m/day, equaling about $5 billion revenue per year. That would equate their market cap to be half the size of google. Maybe someday, but certainly not now.

Wait a minute, is this Facebook or Apple we’re talking about here? Sorry, I got caught up in the hype.

As an advertiser, I’m amazed at all the unchecked hype Facebook is getting. Even though it’s really just another site, I sort of understand the attention from a user’s perspective. I use it myself. But its financial potential and the hype being thrown about in that regard is laughably out of touch with reality. The comparisons to Google and Google’s revenue model are particularly ludicrous. Behaviorally-targeted ads, while a strong step up from contextually-targeted ads, are nothing new and still several rungs down the ladder from search in terms of performance. And contextual/behavioral models don’t scale nearly as well as search either. If they did, Yahoo’s revenues would be larger than Google’s. That’s why all the current valuations and rumored revenue potential are laughably out of touch with reality. Google already had the strongest platform in the strongest area. The fact that they were able to roll keyword-targeted ads out into contextually-targeted ads (across a MUCH broader reach than Facebook will be initially looking at) is just gravy.

Microsoft has had a nice, long peek under Facebook’s skirt by being their primary advertising network. They’ve seen the financial potential. They have by far the deepest pockets (and a current proclivity to spend it) than all the rumored Facebook suitors. And with the acquisition of Aquantive, they’re in a better position than anyone to monetize Facebook. But if the bottom-line value of Facebook really matched the hype, then Microsoft would be making an offer that would make all the previous offers (including the wildly speculative rumor of $6-billion) look like chump change. But the revenue (and potential for revenue growth) just doesn’t even come remotely close to the hype.