Facebook has been steadily growing their advertising services, which is where they make the vast majority of their billions in annual revenue. Since the company has massive amounts of personal data on all of their billion+ users, they are ideally positioned to be able to serve up very targeted ads. They began just publishing ads on their own Facebook page and mobile app, but have since launched the Audience Network, which allowed brands to display ads in a variety of other pages and apps while still using the Facebook data.
They have just announced that they will be expanding the Facebook Advertising Network to users who aren’t already on Facebook. This is a big move for a couple reasons. First, it makes it so they can display ads to more users, which is something they couldn’t previously do. Secondly, adding these types of interactions will help them to gather data on users who don’t actually use their social media platform.
Prior to this move, Google Ads were the clear dominant ad network on the internet. Google has long been showing ads to people from throughout the Internet and gathering their information to allow them to improve targeting of the ads. While there are many other companies that do similar things, Google was the main player.
With Facebook expanding beyond their own users, they are now in direct competition with Google. Of course, Google will still completely control the ads that are shown on their search engine results pages. Facebook will continue to have fully control over what shows up on Facebook itself. All the other pages on the Internet now, are ‘up for grabs’ in terms of who can display ads.
It will be interesting to see whether this move has a negative impact on Google’s bottom line, or if they can both compete in this space while growing their own businesses. In either case, this added competition will undoubtedly drive innovation and greater services to brands and marketers in the future.
