Get a Mac - Watch The TV Ads. Are Facebook Ads Going to Zero? Lookery Lowers Its Guarantee to 7.5-Cent CPMs. Nobody can make money on social network ads.
Even Google (which controls a lot of the inventory on MySpace) is having a hard time. How worthless are these ads? Lookery, an ad network for social apps on Facebook and elsewhere, is renewing a promotion, guaranteeing 15 cents per thousand page impressions to app developers who sign up. With two ads per page, that comes to 7.5 cents per thousand ad impressions (CPMs). Back in January, Lookery was offering 12.5 cents per ad impression. Other social app ad networks, such as Social Media, are commanding CPM ad rates of around 50 cents by focusing on higher-quality inventory. Promoting a guarantee to starving app developers who have no other options is working for Lookery. Lookery is hoping all of those pennies will add up, but it isn’t counting on it. If Lookery can’t sell ads to marketers, maybe it can sell the data.
ComScore Report: Fastest-Growing Sites And Top-Ten Advertising Magnets. Of the top 100 sites on the Web, which ones grew the fastest in 2008?
In a report it is preparing to release tomorrow, The comScore 2008 Digital Year In Review (which you can sign up for here), comScore ranks the 20 fastest-growing Web properties. These are out of the largest 100 sites overall. They are shown in the chart above, as measured by growth in unique visitors. (Interestingly, in a separate list of the ten largest sites, only eBay showed a decline from 2007). Most of the big gains among the fastest growers came because acquisitions (CBS acquiring Cnet, Everyday Health acquiring Revolution Health, JPMorgan Chase acquiring Washington Mutual) or traffic and business partnerships (Break Media, Glam Media, and Everyday Health with Drugstore.com).
If you strip out all of those, which denoted by asterisks, you get the sites that grew organically, including Infospace, WordPress, Weatherbug, Answers.com Sites, Facebook, Hearst Digital Media, and Mozilla. Apps: The Newest Brand Graveyard. NEW YORK Standing before an overflow crowd of the crème de la crème of the advertising world in Cannes this summer, Nike global director of digital media Stefan Olander explained how the brand saw its mission as building community through applications.
He highlighted a new initiative: the Ballers Network, a robust Facebook application built by digital shop R/GA for basketball players to find games and manage leagues. On its Web site, Nike promises it will "revolutionize the way players around the world connect online and compete on the court. " Six months later, Nike is confronting a dilemma familiar to many brands that charged headlong onto Facebook: very few people use Ballers Network. Despite its global ambitions and support in three languages, the application has a mere 3,400 users per month. According to Nike, it's still testing the application. Brands, in general, have found Facebook unforgiving terrain for marketing.
Take Ballers Network. Let's Be Serious: Online Display Ads Will Fall Sharply In 2009. Updated: Facebook’s Cruel Intentions, Facebook Responds « GigaOM. Updated: Facebook Responds, and explains.
It has been 48 hours since I asked Facebook to clarify the point about whether a user’s data is still being passed to them from their web partners even after the user chooses to opt out of Beacon. I’ve since given it a lot of thought and decided that I was not being judgmental in my previous post. Here, after all, is what Mark Zuckerberg told Portfolio. * “The ads are going to feel like content to a lot of people.” * “There is no opting out of advertising.”
Scary, isn’t it? The problem however is, that even though you can choose whether or not it is made public that you visited these sites, Facebook still has the data regardless of your privacy settings. Weiner (via Deep Jive Interests) has suggestions on how to avoid the whole Beacon thing — you need to use this Firefox plugin. It is going to be hard living without some of these big giants, but in most cases there are options.