Twitter Search Advertising. How Can Facebook Crack its Advertising Problem? Why can't Facebook monetize those users? New York Times writer Randall Stross recently wrote a piece about Proctor & Gamble's foray into social networking advertising. The thrust of the story can be found in a quote from Seth Goldstein of SocialMedia Networks: "Advertisers distract users; users ignore advertisers; advertisers distract better; users ignore better. " Few people take the number of fans a company has on Facebook to be a serious indicator of social media advertising success.
So what are Facebook and the other social networks to do? Why consumers click First, we have to understand that there are two major reasons consumers click on online ads: Either consumers knows it is an ad and see it's what they want, so they click - OR - consumers don't know it's an ad and see it's relevant, so they click. The first scenario is targeted and relevant advertising. Of course, this isn't exactly why we want people to click on online ads. What can we learn from Harry Potter? Where. The sharp growth in online video viewing, increasing availability of TV online, and proliferation of high-quality, web-originated content has made it easy to point the arrow for online video advertising up and to the right.
But while video will probably continue to be a bright spot of growth in a dull economy, that’s mostly because it’s just getting started. The reality is revenues will be close to nothing for a long time, and the growing number of tech entrepreneurs and creative types in the space should probably be worried that industry watchers are now cutting their expectations for growth in online video revenues based on factors other than the shaky U.S. economy. eMarketer, which has been putting out good research on online video recently, back in August chopped its estimate for 2008 U.S. video ad revenue by more than half, to $505 million from $1.3 billion. So going forward, what else might depress video advertising CPMs? This article also appeared on Businessweek.com.