Facebook has been Beta testing their Facebook Audience Network (FAN) service on mobile sites for some time now. Using just a limited number of pages and advertisers they have apparently gotten everything configured the way they want it because they are now opening it up to all their advertisers.
Advertisers have been able to use the FAN to run ads on mobile apps for months now, but with this move the 2.5 million current Facebook advertisers will have millions more sites to run their ads. The network is only for mobile sites, however, so desktop ads still aren’t available. It is unclear if they ever will be since the desktop web is not growing significantly.
Publishers will also be able to start incorporating ads from Facebook on their pages to earn money. This, of course, will put Facebook in a much more direct competition with Google’s AdSense. Publishers can add advertising from FAN very easily using just an HTML tag rather than having to integrate with an SDK. This should help expand the number of sites using FAN much more quickly than would otherwise be possible.
Facebook has been very successful at leveraging all the personal data they have collected on their system to produce effective advertisements, and this will likely translate into their ads run on mobile websites across the web.
To learn more about this move from Facebook, click HERE.
