Facebook: a new social media ad model

Following on from Rob's post on the growth of Internet advertising, a lot of people have been noting how ad spend online is still wildly disproportionate to the amount of people surfing the net and spending time online.

One area this is particularly true is social networking, where sites like MySpace and Bebo are drawing in huge crowds but not the ad dollars to match it (although this is growing I hear).

Now one of their newer competitors, Facebook, is getting ready to initiate a new spin on how to promote brands and products on social networks: sell pages to partners like Amazon and Apple and Ebay (I guess...), where they can create portals to sell their wares, and then make it possible for Facebook members to embed into their pages links/portals/widgets to links to these. According to this article Facebook won't be taking a cut from the sales so presumably they will be charging a pretty penny for the privilege of accessing Facebook users (anonymously of course).

(I'm still waiting for a reply from Facebook about all this directly. Will post it here when/if I get it.)

From what I understand this isn't being done by the other sites yet but if the premium on these sites is their dedicated eyeball count, then this could be a good way of capitalising on it.

And it positions a social network like Facebook in a new position as a portal of sorts, like Google or Yahoo but more recommended.

Internet advertising exceeds 10% for first time

WARC News - WARC.com
Research for the Advertising Association yearbook compiled by WARC noted that for the first time in 2006 internet advertising in Great Britain exceeded 10% of the total. As they estimated advertising expenditure in Great Britain as £19 billion in 2006, this is nearly £2 billion online!

Television was still the biggest element of spend, followed by Press (inc newspapers and magazines), but both saw falls in their share.