Is Facebook Planning to Launch its Own Ad Network in a Few Months?

Business insider reports that a source has informed them of a possible launch of an Ad Network in around 6 months time. The source who is an online advertising industry guy has apparently been in discussion with Facebook on this matter.

Facebook plans to build the ad network on the Facebook Connect platform that it launched last year. The service essentially lets users register or login to third party sites using their Facebook credentials. Commenting on blogs for instance.  The Facebook developer page lists its features as :

• Seamlessly “connect” their Facebook account and information with your site
• Connect and find their friends who also use your site
• Share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook

We had run a review and comparison of both Facebook as well as Google connect which launched almost simultaneously earlier.

Unlike Beacon, Facebook’s earlier attempt at minting money Connect appears a safer and more scalable bet. While with beacon they were infringing on privacy and sharing information with advertisers, with connect they are building a completely different platform the benefit of which will actually lie with publishers and not advertisers. It can give insights on the preferences and activities of users on publisher’s websites, how the engage and who they engage with. It in fact holds potential to actually be a more comprehensive analytic tool than any other. All this gives enough reasons for the top publishers to integrae FB connect with their website and that’s where the ad network play comes in. The access FB can get thus with most top publishers on board will then be its bait to bring advertisers on board.

Good ploy, but will it work? Will it create the same privacy concerns that it other efforts have met with? How will the publisher’s respond to this? How will the sharing work out? Questions, and all this on a piece of thought that is not yet official.

It would be interesting to see how this news spans out, even though it might be close to the end of the year before any likelyhood of it coming out officially. It would also be interesting to see Facebook does anything to its Lexicon product as well, which to my mind is another splendid tool for marketers if refined further.