Facebook's Social Ad Network: What We (Think We) Know So Far
Just as Google is preparing to take Facebook head-on with its own social-networking platform, it appears that Facebook is preparing to take on Google with its own social ad network. The announcement of what people …
Context & Ripple Effects
The ad-targeting race has been building all fall: GigaOM flagged in August that MySpace already had the ad targeting Facebook lacked, and paidContent's September piece asked what happens if Facebook starts pulling its data out of reach. By mid-October VentureBeat was reporting Google weighing an AdSense play inside Facebook itself.
Now the frame flips: Google's OpenSocial platform is confirmed and set to go live Thursday, and Facebook is reportedly answering with a cookie-tracking SocialAds product said to be launching November 6 — unconfirmed, but widely enough picked up that VentureBeat ran a valuation piece speculating it could push Facebook toward $100 billion. The two companies are converging on each other's core businesses at the same moment.
First-order effects
- If the reported November 6 launch holds, Facebook would begin monetizing member identity and browsing behavior beyond facebook.com, putting its profile graph head-to-head with Google's ad network rather than just its own page inventory.
- Advertisers get a second large-scale behavioral targeting source within weeks of each other — Google via OpenSocial's distributed apps, Facebook via reportedly cookie-tracked SocialAds — forcing early media buyers to pick a side or split budgets.
Second-order effects
- Google's OpenSocial rollout, confirmed for Thursday, becomes both a developer platform and a defensive move: by distributing apps across many networks it tries to make any single network's data advantage less decisive.
- MySpace, which GigaOM noted already runs targeted ads, gains leverage as the neutral inventory source both giants court — and as proof that social-graph targeting predates either newcomer's product.
Third-order effects
- Cookie-based tracking of members' browsing across third-party sites points toward an industry structured around who owns identity data rather than who owns pageviews — with privacy scrutiny and possible regulatory attention as the likely cost of that model if it scales.
- A durable Google–Facebook rivalry over social distribution and ad targeting would fragment the web into competing platform blocs, echoing the gatekeeper-leverage dynamics that define every prior platform war.
The trend: Social networks are shifting from selling ads against their own pages to monetizing member identity across the wider web, with Facebook and Google now building rival platforms to control that targeting layer.