Facebook recently announced that it now has over 300 million monthly active users and it has become “free cash flow positive”. It’s 300 million unique users is a mountain over Twitter’s soon to be 18 million users by the end of 2009.
Facebook revenue is “likely going to be above $550 million this year,” reported by Inside Facebook. Last year, the company brought in a total of between $280 million and $300 million.
In early July, Business Insider said they’d heard revenue was growing even faster, to around $550 million. Revenue has been reported to be broken down into the following categories:
• $125 million from brand ads
• $150 million from Facebook’s ad deal with Microsoft
• $75 million from virtual goods
• $200 million from self-service ads.
Following on from these reports, Facebook hopes to increase it’s brand advertisers by teaming up with Nielsen. This deal will allow advertisers to “measure the impact of ads on Facebook through polls that Facebook will show its users who have seen the ads. Facebook will then compare the users’ responses to those of other people who didn’t see the ads and package the data for advertisers.” However you will have to be a Nielsen customer in order to use Brand Lift.
The question I ask, is Facebook ads with polls attached to them that great for social media metrics?
Personally I believe it’s like going back to bog standard radio measurement and saying to a few hundred people did you listen to Capital or Radio 1!
I haven’t seen the product yet, but ’social media’ isn’t just about creating a Facebook ad – Google could come along and just start distributing ads there straight away and most marketing directors wouldn’t be that bothered, that’s just pay per click / cpm in a different environment.
Social media is about conversation, which users actually conversed with their friends about that product, or even better – conversed with the brand. And I don’t just mean posted on their wall, I mean a user who actually got some benefit back from the interaction. We need deeper more intelligent brand measurement tools if marketeers and their client will ever be persuaded to venture into social media with force. This current offering isn’t the answer to social media scepticism!
I look forward to how Facebook integrate this and if this is just purely a way of Facebook tapping into Nielsen’s customer database.
