Facebook’s explosive growth has mushroomed a whole lot of application advertising opportunities for web developers to pursue. RockYou, one of the major application developer on Facebook has appointed iThink Labs to sell its Ad inventory for Indian and few West asian markets.
RockYou is 2nd largest social applications provider after Zynga and on similar path with Slide. It currently enjoys loyalty of more than 188 million unique users each month with 80% of traffic originating from facebook alone. It currently serves 15 billion ad impression on facebook through RockYou Ads, Ad network for social applications. On Facebook it has credible apps like Birthday Cards,Zoo world whereas on Orkut it serves apps like slideshow and horoscopes.
Indian and West Asian markets like – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Oman and Bahrain garners 250-300 million impressions for RockYou out of which only 20 per cent was monetized till now. It really makes sense for RockYou to go for an Indian partner as social networks mostly attract ads from region specific ad players unlike Search engine marketing.
iThink Labs claims to serve around 150 million page impressions at the moment and will almost double its ad inventory with this partnership. iThink Labs will however enjoy the flexibility in pricing as RockYou has so far not been able to monetize asia based inventory with success. Indian markets are still nascent when it comes to social media advertising although search engine marketing is beginning to shape up.
