Last week we spoke about the idea of Facebook planning an Ad network of its own that is doing rounds of the web. And yesterday we saw the first step by Facebook to take itself beyond the realms of its web boundaries and become ubiquitous around the world wide web. What’s on with Facebook, how does it help it and how can any site gain anything by letting people go out of its site?
And before I head to putting my view on it, let’s read this other news that had quietly spilled on to the web was of Twitter launching Twitter Connect, Facebook’s rival. Though it offer the same feature that people can use their Twitter credo on third party websites unlike Facebook it doesn’t have any profile/social information passing on and that’s because Twitter doesn’t have much of a social profile.. what will it share – tweets?
However, the point is both the social media scions are treading on the same territory, and both have a strong business reason to do so.
A point that was discussed in WATBlog’s last panel in Mumbai was how Google changed the way advertising on the web was perceived (not in exactly the same words though). See before Google decided on contextual advertising, PPC and the long tail and all the jazz as it’s model of earning revenue and made it work people had set perceptions about what is right in advertising and Text Ads was not part of it.
Text advertising had died before Google gave birth to it again, anyone remember those ‘click here to keep this site free’ days?
The biggest problem Google faced was that no one stayed on Google, so advertisers didn’t see the logic of advertising on Google because it sent users away from the site. Google worked on that to its advantage and came up with Adwords which didn’t fight with the inherent strucutre of a search engine and added value to sending people out of the site and earned money for doing so.
Facebook now has a different problem, no one is leaving the site, so advertising in the regular form isn’t working because people don’t click and leave. And users don’t want banners popping up on their profiles so banners exactly aren’t the perfect option within the site either. This is the reason FB isn’t making enough money.
What Facebook perhaps is slowly realizing is the need to alter advertising to meet the way it altered web browsing. And if users are not going to leave the site, then make Facebook strong and flexible enough to let users take FB whereever they go and build a business model thus. It is trying to make staying on its site an advantage from a disadvantage. And perhpas opening its API, introducing Connect, etc. are its baby step in this direction.
