LinkedIn has released their DirectAds product which allows advertisers to target the LinkedIn audience in the US (for now) directly. LinkedIn claims 12 million or so targetable US users, though we’re not sure it actually says what the “activity window” for these users is. A week, a month, 45 days? We may have missed it.
If […]

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Our latest aggregated look at the advertising data made available by Facebook as part of its Social Ads program. All of this data was gathered on July 16th via their advertising interface. We looked at the number of users in the “Any” to “Any” age range and then also looked at the suggested-bid CPM figures […]

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Don’t be afraid to experiment with different ads and targeting. Be sure to check in on your ads regularly to monitor their performance. Try new combinations of targeting, creative,or bid amounts using the data available in your Ad Manager from past ads to help guide your edits.
Facebook Ads Newsletter, July 1, […]

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The WSJ ran a story about LinkedIn’s $53 million cash infusion here. And I found this line interesting:

LinkedIn’s average user is 41 years old and has a household income of $109,000, according to Mr. Nye.
Facebook said it doesn’t release specific demographic information and declined to comment. But the company’s Web site says more than half […]

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The IAB email this morning caught my eye because it referenced a BusinessWeek article that mentions a study done by Rapleaf (a company that aggregates social network information and has come under fire for some of its marketing tactics), saying (my emphasis added) “Rapleaf CEO Auren Hoffman, citing a recent study by her firm, […]

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Total    - 63,411,040 -    100.0%
USA    - 24,741,720 -    39.0%
UK    - 8,905,320 -    14.0%
Canada    - 8,869,280 -    14.0%
Turkey    - 3,024,880 -    4.8%
Australia    - 2,430,840 -    3.8%
France    - 1,251,260 -    2.0%
Colombia    - 1,130,400 -    1.8%
Norway    - 1,075,100 -    1.7%
Sweden    - 1,059,300 -    1.7%
South Africa    - 739,340 -    1.2%
Mexico    - 688,300 -    1.1%
Hong Kong    - 639,360 -    1.0%
Egypt    […]

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Using data made available by Adonomics (aggregating app install and active user figures available on Facebook), we did a comparison between app install and active user numbers from January 30, 2008 and February 23, 2008 — over this time period for the top 1589 applications from January 30 (all those with over 22,250 installed users […]

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We’ve been tracking a variety of statistics using Facebook’s active user figures as disclosed as part of their Social Ads system. As expected, there has been a good deal of growth in their older users, as is reflected in the chart below. The average age of their US user base is still very young, however, […]

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Esther Dyson’s column in the WSJ entitled “The Coming Ad Revolution” got my attention at first mainly because it mentioned the ISP targeting companies “NebuAd, Project Rialto, Phorm, Frontporch and Adzilla” about which not too much (yet) has been written in the mainstream press. As they work to try to sign up ISPs, these […]

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We looked back at the user numbers Facebook provides to users of its self-service advertising system again, having checked the figures by age a few times since the end of November. The growth in Facebook’s user population from 11/24/07 until today 01/29/08 was 711,840 users, a 3.2% increase over 66 days, or 10,785 users per […]

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We’re launching our research effort to survey the current landscape among Facebook application developers, to learn a bit more about how they are doing on the revenue side and to help educate the marketplace. We encourage all Facebook application creators out there to participate in our survey. We will share the aggregate results with all […]

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Ning appears to be ramping up and getting a lot of traffic from what they say. We created a network on their platform and we reported a bug to them yesterday, as the site threw an exception while we were using it and they replied that:
We had our largest day yet yesterday, and during peak […]

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We expect user growth for Facebook to be much better among the older part of its audience that is still underrepresented.  Their internal numbers and those put out by the traffic tracking services would confirm it. That being said, it remains difficult to reconcile Facebook’s internal numbers with figures put out by comScore Media Metrix, […]

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Classmates announced it has dropped its IPO plans. Not wholly unexpected: we have been fairly bearish on them as we were discussing their prospects with a couple of folks. Here’s what we would say before we saw this past month’s comScore Media Metrix numbers: Setting aside current market conditions, Classmates certainly continues to make money […]

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We’re running some test campaigns using Facebook’s adserving system right now and one of them has an eCPM of close to $1.00 and a 1% clickthrough rate. Their system still needs a lot of work — from a workflow perspective it’s obviously very poor, but I’m sure they’ll get there eventually.
Look out for more details […]

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As usual, Danny Sullivan is able to inject some commonsense into the hype-filled discussions about the power and promise of social advertising.
Advertisers in search aren’t hoping they’ll be less in the way than in other forms of media. Advertisers in search are eagerly sought solutions.
Search isn’t the real problem. There is a very wide and […]

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There is an extremely large difference between the user demographic figures reported by Facebook itself (captured from their ad targeting system and aggregated by CPM Advisors), and those tracked via comScore’s Media Metrix online measurement panel. We should point out that the assumption that the Facebook figures are correct is by no means a foregone […]

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We analyzed some of the data Facebook makes available about the demographics of its users via its ad targeting system. We noticed that the number of male and female users did not add up: it turns out that some users do not indicate what their gender is - and that this tendency increases greatly as […]

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Someone has aggregated the user stats from Facebook’s advertising system on the addressable user base in various countries (however, these are just for users 18+). I haven’t yet seen someone calculate some penetration figures by country based on these but it can’t be far behind surely?

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Online dating companies looking to use Facebook’s new advertising system to find new customers may be in for a hard time (pardon the pun)…. Facebook users don’t seem to be that interested in sex, at least not according to Facebook. Click below for the full page image.

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We went into the Facebook targeted ad system, and started seeing what kind of prevalence there was for various terms that would (we hoped) show up on peoples’ profiles and to which we could target advertising. After noticing that you cannot target users from more than one country at a time, we started with something […]

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Facebook discusses their new advertising system in a posting on their blog. They say that some things will change and some things will not:
First of all, what’s not changing:

Facebook will always stay clutter-free and clean.

Facebook will never sell any of your information.

You will always have control over your information and your Facebook experience.

You will not […]

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We looked at some of the data, and the affinities between US-based users of some of the announced OpenSocial platform partners with one another and with Facebook users are pretty high. Index values of over 100 in the data linked below indicate a higher penetration of visitation by that group of visitors to the company […]

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It was fairly widely reported (including by Venture Beat - though they didn’t quote any of NetRatings’s numbers, why not?) that Facebook unique visitors dropped 9.3% from August to September 2007 [Facebook profile]. We took a closer look at the demographic changes from August to September 2007 with respect to Facebook’s US traffic figures, as […]

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