Facebook has confirmed that they are making another attempt to break into the very lucrative mobile advertising market. They have tried running ad networks using the massive amounts of data they have on millions of users before, with little success. They ran ads on the social gaming site of Zynga, and then last September they had a service which published mobile ads in apps outside of Facebook. While it was a very small test, it generated under $3 Million before it was abandoned.
While there is not yet any word on what apps or sites this new mobile ad network is being tested on, or even how large the testing is going to be, it seems this a larger scale test than their past efforts. Facebook is estimated to increase their mobile ad revenue by more than five times this year, from $471 million in 2012 to approximately $2.63 billion in 2013, according to predictions from the research firm eMarketer Inc.
While the bulk of that increase will be from ads displayed from within Facebook’s mobile app, there is plenty of room for mobile ads on third party apps and sites as well. Investors are also undoubtedly pushing for Facebook to expand their advertising network’s reach as well. Facebook is sitting on a gold mine of information about all their users, which would make displaying very targeted ads extremely easy and effective.
A spokesman for Facebook said, “Our goal is to improve the relevancy of the ads people see.” Naturally, he didn’t share any further details on where these ads would be seen, but at this early phrase of testing that is to be expected. Many people (including myself) expect Facebook will try to move quickly on this since the mobile advertising market is growing rapidly, and other companies are jumping in and trying to establish themselves.
Of course, there is already Google’s ad network. Twitter just purchased the mobile advertising firm MoPub, which they could develop into a major network quite easily, and there are many smaller ad networks in the mobile arena. I would expect to see further announcements concerning the mobile ad network from Facebook in the coming weeks or months.
