Why should Facebook, its advertising partners, and application developers be the only ones to be able to make money from spamming your friends with ads and come-ons? Today, Ads-Click launched a private beta called MicroSocialAds that will let you get in on the advertising frenzy by inserting targeted, contextual text ads into your Facebook page. (As if Beacon wasn’t bad enough). Every time your friends click through to that Dell laptop or natural Viagra ad, you will get paid 80 percent of the ad! You may also find yourself without any friends. But, hey, at least you will be richer for it. Marginally. (Disclosure: Ads-Click is a TechCrunch sponsor and our TechCrunch France editor, Ouriel Ohayon, sits on its board).
The ads on Facebook will appear as a line of text no more than 35 characters long. They are designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, are highly targetable by interest, and allow people to opt out of them. Ads-Click will match each ad from its network of more than 200,000 advertisers. The MicroSocialAds will be added to people’s profile pages just like any other Facebook application. (Again, the private beta just launched, so you won’t find this by searching Facebook’s application directory just yet). Explains Ads-Click CEO Pascal Rossini
We take the same approach as a company like AdBrite who already does this on Facebook, or any other app that uses AdSense. The only difference is that we remunerate the users and not the app owner.
Fair enough. But this is sure to be controversial on many levels. First and foremost, anyone who adds such an app to their Facebook page would appear to be in direct violation of Facebook’s terms of use, which unequivocally state:
In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to . . . upload, post, transmit, share or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, solicitations, promotional materials, “junk mail,” “spam,” “chain letters,” “pyramid schemes,” or any other form of solicitation;
On the other hand, Facebook is built on the backs of its users. They supply most of the content and activity. Why shouldn’t they get a cut of the advertising generated from their personal Facebook page—or MySpace or Bebo page, for that matter?
In fact, MicroSocialAds are not limited to Facebook. The personal ads also work with MSN Messenger, and will soon be available on Twitter, Yahoo IM, Skype, and OpenSocial. If you have no problem spamming your friends, or if the ads could be micro-targeted by you to the point where they don’t feel like ads, but more like personal product suggestions, then they might actually work out. The concept, though, certainly blurs the line between the social and the commercial. They need to be social enough so that they are palatable to the people expected to add them to their social communications, but commercial enough that they offer a return for advertisers.
What do you think? Does this represent the next stage in personalized advertising, or is it offensive?
I like it… by this time next year Facebook will become MySpace and the trendsetters will have moved on. The seeds have been planted and now comes the fertilizer.
@31: something’s way off with your math: if each user could get $30 a month in revenue, that’d imply that all profile pages are worth $30*60 million = $1.8 billion per month! do you really think facebook is doing tens of billions of dollars a year in revenue, just on profile page views?
i’m not sure how you got the $30 number - let’s use the high end of your estimates (66 billion PVs/month): that’s 33 billion profile page views using your 50% number, which using your $0.10 CPM translates to $3.3 million, divided by 60 million profiles (assuming all profile page views are evenly distributed) comes out to 5.5 cents per user per month.
Ads-click Blog extract:
http://www.ads-click.com/blog/?p=38
Micro Social advertising is a major evolution in how to produce advertising. From the «portal centric» dimension (search engine, big portal, ad network), advertising evoles towards the notion of «user centric» which is the perfect finality. In this trend, it is the consumer that defines for himself and his community of interest the formats and the advertisements. He has and leaves the complete control over the diffusion of these ads to the members of his community.
In the future, advertisers will no longer purchase millions of impressions, but rather user profiles and behaviors, and for this, they are ready to invest massively and by doing so create a new ecosystem in which the end user will play a critical media role which over time will surpass that of traditional media.
This new dimension will overwelm the global advertising sector and microsocial advertising is one of the first pillars that shows a direction that is in perfect accord with the tendencies that govern the digital universe today, going from the direct economy to virtual worlds.
Pascal Rossini - CEO
This is not new… Personal social networks as an advertising platform was used by MLM companies, especially cosmetics (like avon, fabelic, oriflame and many more). Think trends, not products - this approach is proven extremely successful and it’s only a matter of time that we’re going to see online social networks being monetized by the owners (as in - real owners, not the owners of the platform).
“i will delete whoever who do this to me. No more friends. why don’t you just ask, i will give you a quarter.” => you get no friends at this time maybe you lie again son of kretz….