Brilliant: Advertisers Pay To Drive Traffic From One Place On Facebook To Another Place On Facebook

So I was reading this Comscore report about the massive number of ads that are being served on social networks. 8.2% of all display ads on the Internet today in the U.S. are being served on Facebook. Wow. MySpace still has a small lead there, with 9.2%. Overall, social networks are serving up 21% of all U.S. display ads, and that’s with Twitter basically still on the sidelines.

Anyhow, as soon as I finish reading the report and some of the associated coverage, I see an email from Facebook in my inbox. It says:

Hi there,

My name is Melissa and I work in advertising at Facebook. Could you forward this along to the appropriate person who does your online media buying?

I am a huge TechCrunch fan, and I think TechCrunch has one of the best Pages on Facebook. It has seen a sizeable amount of organic fan growth, and the Page content does a great job keeping users engaged. Now that we have “Become a Fan” cost-per-click ads, it’s easier than ever to expand your fan base to a much greater size. With over 250MM users, we can target by various parameters to reach the right people that would want to fan the TechCrunch Page. Having 9,000 fans is a great start, but with the potential for 50,000 or even 500,000 fans, you can make your updates that much more effective.

Running through our online tool, you can control your daily budget, ad creatives, and target audience so your ads are as effective as possible. We can also have a dedicated account manager work with you to make sure the ads are being optimized for the best performance. I am more than happy to help with this fan-growth effort and tap into the potential that TechCrunch’s Page has on Facebook. Feel free to reach out to me by phone at 650-xxx-xxxx or via email at xxxxxx@facebook.com, and I can set you up with a business account and some free ad credits to get started. Look forward to hearing from you!

And all I can think is, how did these guys manage to set up a system where people pay to drive traffic from one place on Facebook to another place on Facebook? Even Google hasn’t managed to figure that one out yet. I’ve known they (and MySpace) have done this since launching their ad platforms, but it never really hit home until today how brilliant this all is.

They even have a nice pre-created ad to show me when I visit our fan page on Facebook, and offer to let me pay via cost per impression or cost per click. It’s all so easy. All I have to do is pull out my credit card and push Facebook a little bit closer to that looming IPO.

I love the Internet.