Facebook Uses Personal Profile Data for Targeted Ads: Evil or Clever?

Passion 08-23-2007

Facebook is in the process of creating a new advertising model that it can present to marketers, using the personal data found on users’ profiles. Has Facebook finally found a way to better monetize its site?

Utilizing the information users share about themselves on their profile, Facebook will enable very targeted advertising options for businesses. Taking it a step further, the model will also allow for a bit of predictive marketing to take place, making assumptions about a user’s interests based on what information is on their profile, including gender, zip code, date of birth, occupation, music preferences and more.

These ads will come in the form of newsfeed items, though these haven’t entirely been proven as the most effective ads on Facebook either. Will the highly targeted ads, which are formated after Google’s own AdWords system, be clever or just creepy? Or is this just part of what we should come to expect from advertisements on social networks? With the popularity of the Facebook applications, it will be even easier to gather highly personal information about a person, and serve up targeted ads as a result.

While Facebook has also recently modified its advertisers’ options to offer more control to businesses, other companies such as Lookery are creating advertising networks for Facebook apps.

Lynn

I don't really see that much wrong with it, unless it becomes a security issue. Amazon and Target has been doing this for a very long time so its not like its something new.

Hsoolien

It's the net and someone somewhere must pay, which reminds me, how does the Wiki keep up, it's adfree, yet serves an insane amount of data a second, it has server clusters handling page requests, and server clusters that are separate handling page rendering. not cheap.

Raven

Yeah this is nothing new but I don't think many people really knew about it or understand how it work. This is how most of all advertisement works. Its targeted.

Nina

Hsool I've been wondering that for a while now. The est I've been able to guest to selling traffic infomation but I couldn't think of anything else.

Hsoolien

As far as I've been able to find out, it's private donations. Some people are willing to part with lots of cash to support it. I know they've been discussing text based Google Text type ads...

Raven

Well it wouldn't take alot of cash. With the number of people who actually use it if each of them just gave them a dollar it would pay for everyone many times over.

Nina

AD-Free websites. There so few left on the web these days. Even small 1 page sites are having ads now.