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Facebook has surpassed Google in terms of ad impressions, but its average CPM still remains drastically below the industry standard for a site of its size. So what does this mean for the future of Facebook as an ad platform? Well, maybe the better question is: How many ad platforms does Facebook really have?

Roses & Thorns

Late last week, comeScore release new data showing that more than 24 percent of all US online display ads in September appeared on Facebook — more than twice as many as any other publisher. Meanwhile, Google only managed 2.7 percent of online ad displays.

Despite this success, however, the average value of Facebook’s CPMs are often less than half of its competitors. As the WSJ reported:

Several agencies put the average price of an ad on Facebook in the U.S. in the $2 to $8 range for a thousand views, depending on targeting options and where it appears on the site. The price is lower than the average $15 that other premium media sites can charge.

Even at the low-end of $2 a percentage point with 24 percent of market, Facebook outperforms Google at the high-end of $15 a point with 2.7 percent of the market. However, comScore’s display ad data doesn’t seem include Google Adwords’ text ads and sponsored search results.

After all, while Facebook is expected to make $1.28 billion in 2010, Google made more than 5 times that in Q1 2010 alone, reporting $6.77 billion in revenues!

Promising Future for Facebook Ads

So what does this all mean? Well, it can mean a few things.

First, it could mean that Facebook has purposely kept CPMs down to attract more advertisers. This would make a lot of sense since they’re a much younger, less seasoned ad platform. By keeping the CPMs down, they can attract a broader breadth of advertisers, work out more bugs, and develop a better product.

Second, it could mean that Facebook advertisers just haven’t gotten that competitive, and the platform hasn’t hit critical mass. Essentially, a good chunk of Facebook CPMs are calculate on it CPC offering, so if there isn’t as much competition over this ad space, meaning Facebook Ads is just getting started.

Third, it could mean that Facebook is just biding its time. Indeed, the company seems to very interested in mobile (where it has a head start over Google), and the current Facebook Ads platform could just be to keep the boat afloat until mobile is the main digital channel and they have a better shot at market dominance.

Finally, it can also mean that advertisers are simply not willing to pay as much for a Facebook impression or click. This stems from the fact that Facebook users are there to socialize, not buy, and Facebook encourages advertisers to drive traffic to their Facebook pages and not their actual site. If this is the case, however, it will undoubtedly change as Facebook makes more of a foray into the mobile marketing space.

The Many Faces of Facebook

Okay, so here’s what we do know about Facebook:

1) they have 23 percent of all display ad impressions in the US,
2) even at the low end of their average CPM, they’re making more at the display game than their competitors,
3) they’re not making nearly as much as Google is,
4) through Places and Deal they have a one-up on Google in the mobile space, and
5) they are not going anywhere any time soon.

So, what does that mean for Facebook as an ad platform? Well, it depends how you want to look at it. Because while the website Facebook is one platform, that will make over $1 billion in 2010, it becomes another platform when you add Facebook Deals to it, and then there’s Facebook Mobile, Facebook Mobile with Places, and Facebook Mobile with Places and Deals.

Overall, it looks like Facebook is further along than anyone in developing an ad platform that is social, mobile, location-based and offers incentivized call-to-actions. As an advertiser you might call it a one stop shop; and it’s all powered by a community of 500 million users.

If I was Google, or any of Facebook’s others competitors, display ads would be the least of my worries.

Earlier this week, it was announced that the comparison shopping site, TheFind, took social shopping to a new level by integrating Facebook Connect in an unprecedented way. This move might represent a double-edged sword for the world of affiliate marketing, lending much needed legitimacy to the red-headed stepchild of online advertising, but potentially crowding out many of the smaller players.

TheFind is a “super-affiliate” par excellence because it is the second most popular shopping site, and it makes commissions from allowing users to compare products and prices across multiple sites, and then referring them to the merchant of their choice. And as TechCrunch recently reported, TheFind is now tapping into users’ social graphs to upsell and cross-sell to its users:

TheFind’s newest social commerce feature, Shop Like Friends, allows you to sign into the site Facebook Connect and tap into the the tastes and preferences of any of your Facebook Friends, based on the stores and brands they ‘like’ on the platform. So when you sign on, TheFind requests access to the pages your friends have “liked” on Facebook, then maps the stores and brands it detects to over 40,000 different stores and brands on TheFind.

This is important for several reasons. First, it demonstrates that it’s perfectly viable to tap social media APIs to better target advertising and increase ad revenues. After all, when the second largest shopping site does something, advertisers pay attention.

But it’s also significant because it might institutionalize two classes of affiliate marketers. You see, we already distinguish between affiliate and super-affiliates, but that distinction is largely arbitrary. We know when we see a super-affiliate, but we don’t know exactly where the dividing line is.

So as more super-affiliates move towards this level of social integration, many smaller affiliates might find it harder to compete — and, as a result, grow their business. Specifically, integrating social graphs to this extent requires considerable technical resources which, in turn, requires a considerable investment.

In other words, the smaller guys who lack the resources to do so might have a harder time both retaining their existing users and growing their user-base. First, fewer and fewer users will be willing to use these regular affiliate sites because the user-experience is lacking. Secondly, because these affiliates will have a harder time upselling/cross-selling, it’ll be more difficult for them to grow their revenues to super-affiliate proportions.

Of course, TheFind’s move toward social shopping is not going to kill off smaller affiliates. It’s just going to make it a bit tougher for them. But hey, those are the breaks.

After all, the technology was already there. It was just a matter of time before one of the big guys started using it. And just like it was a lot easier for the small guys to rank organically in 2003 than it is today, offering a seamless social integration is also going to get a lot tougher, too. But that’s the price of mainstream legitimacy: increased market competition.

Mark Zuckerberg’s mouth has gotten him a lot of trouble over privacy issues. In January, he declared the end to the age of privacy, and admitted “that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private.” Then, in April, a NY Times journalist outed Zuck’s true privacy colors by tweeting an off-the-record chat with a Facebook employee.

Later, in May, someone leaked some IMs wherein a 19 year old Zuck called his users “dumb f*cks” for trusting him with their data. Zuck tired back pedalling a month later, but still remains persona non grata in the realm of privacy concerns.

As much as Zuck is someone we love to hate when it comes to our privacy, we continue to Facebook, letting it reach its tentacles deeper and deeper into our data.

So it kind of begs the question: Do we kind of sense that Zuck is right about privacy after all?

Social Creatures, Social Users

Aristotle once pointed out that “man is by nature a political animal.” What he was getting at was that human beings are inherently social creatures. After all, the word politics comes from the Greek politikós, meaning “citizen” or “civilian,” and you need a social collective before there can be “citizens.”

Consider language. Not only does our innate faculty of language differentiate us from all other species, but it is testament to our inherently social nature.

And how could language evolve other than in a social context?

Indeed, language is at the core of our nature — our social nature. Without it, we would have no history, no culture, and no society. Chimpanzees, for instance, can communicate and even have culture, but they don’t have society because they don’t have a language with a universal grammar.

Privacy of the Species

So what does language have to do with privacy? Well, a lot of things.

For starters, the point of language is to communicate, and privacy hinders the communication of information. Secondly, we’re talking about privacy in the context of social media, and social networks are tools that facilitate natural human behavior.

But privacy entails a lack of communication. Had primitive man been private or practiced intellectual property, the species as a whole would’ve probably never evolved to a level of prosperity where concepts such as privacy and intellectual property could be enshrined by our societies.

Instead, social group communication has played a critical role and is responsible for our position in the food chain. Without it, primitive man would’ve been no match for the element or woolly mammoth. But through communication, we learned from one another, cultivated land, and regularly hunted such formidable beast — many of them to the point of extinction.

A Place & Time for Privacy

All this begs the question: So where did we come up with the idea of privacy? And why does it appeal to us on such a primal and personal level?

Well, the answer is simple. Privacy had its place in evolution. We’re just getting one place confused for another.

You see, privacy offers a competitive advantage when you’re vulnerable. It offers you protection from predators when your guard is down. This is why we instinctively seek privacy when we sleep, go to the bathroom, or mate.

But social situations are not one of those moments. In fact, privacy and socializing are very much at odds with one another.

And since social media is just an extension of socializing, we might have to accept that there there are inherent limits to our privacy online. We might even have to accept that it’s at odds with the core functionality of these social tools.

So as to create backlinks (or again-hyperlinks in some components of the world), some web site publishers resort to link-spamming. As a way to create back-links, without being thought of a spammer, it’s good to make sure that the places on which you place the links are related to your website.

Of course, in relation to links posted on social networking websites, the information is not going to necessarily be relevant. But, should you clarify why you are suggesting that your pals go to the web site, then you have created a valid link and avoided being thought-about spam.

Yow will discover backlinks all over the worldwide web, however they had been initially developed before the creation of search engines. They have been a method wherein an individual may navigate from one web page to the other. Since there have been no search engines like google, a web site can be a dead-end for browsing, if there have been no outgoing links.

If you create backlinks or another person posts a hyperlink to your website, then the search engines might contemplate that a ?vote? for your site. Google, for instance, considers a hyperlink on one website to be a vote for the landing site.

The various search engines use ?bots? (spiders, crawlers, and many others) to search out backlinks and evaluate the anchor text. The anchor text is the word or phrase that is getting used as a hyperlink. If the anchor text is relevant to the content of the webpage, then it is considered a sound vote. When the bots find backlinks without related anchor text, the hyperlinks aren’t recorded as votes.

With a purpose to create backlinks for a website or on-line business that’s just beginning out, there are a number of things that you could do.

First, you may ship an e-mail that features a again-hyperlink to your entire buddies or household members. You don’t have to sell them on anything, just allow them to find out about accomplishments along with your on-line business and embody a hyperlink again to your website in order that they will verify it out.

Second is to utilize current social networking sites. You’ll discover backlinks on quite a lot of completely different topics on social networks. This is a great solution to get backlinks. You would possibly contemplate it a reasonable type of advertising.

You can also turn into an advertiser with social networks like Facebook and My Space. The fees charged by the websites for advertising are often extra reasonably priced than the rates charged by different large web sites, which the major search engines are inclined to favor.

The third suggestion is the most troublesome for some individuals, however it’s essential change into an expert. Virtually everyone seems to be an skilled about something. By finding your area of experience and writing informative articles about that subject, you possibly can create backlinks that may never be thought of as spam.

Lastly, you’ll be able to search for related websites and send an email to the proprietor or webmaster. This may take some time, but you may create backlinks that may actually aid you for years to come.

Create spam-free backlinks using free angela backlinks and free paul backlinks.

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So they’ve finally gone all in: Facebook has launched Places, their internal location-based-service (LBS) marketplace, and when the third largest (yet poorest) country in the world does something new, the world watches.

For the moment, Facebook Places is only in the US, and still doesn’t have a writing API, but that will all change quickly. As that changes, it will have some serious implications for the Internet. Here are 3 ways in which Facebook Places is going to change the digital landscape:

1. The web just got a bit more closed

Earlier this week, Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff of Wired proclaimed that the web is dead. Their reasoning was that as we use apps more and more to consume content and interact with others, the internet becomes “less about the searching and more about the getting“.

Well, with Facebook Places, your run-of-the-mill Facebook app will start doing what you once needed a Foursquare, Gowalla, and Yelp app to do. This means Facebook has secured much more of a stake in how the net’s evolving.

More importantly, though, it means Facebook users have that much less of a reason to go beyond the walls of Facebook. And that is precisely the behavior Google should be worried about.

2. LBS is going mainstream

The advent of Facebook Places may be the big push we need to take LBS mainstream. And the way LBS will reach that level of adoption is through its Facebook smartphone apps.

Social media apps and consumer engagement with them is the reason that smartphones will push LBS mainstream. Those little apps are gold and consumers are infatuated with them. Such apps will let the marketing industry take LBS advertising beyond mere SMS spam.

Now, sites such as Foursquare and Gowalla already offer apps and user-experiences that make LBS advertising possible, but they don’t quite yet have the user-base. As Michael Lazerow of AdAge points out:

Foursquare and Gowalla combined have just a few million users. Facebook has north of half a billion. When Facebook gets into a market, they bring everyone. Literally, everyone.

So while Foursquare and Gowalla have had potential LBS technology all along, they lacked the audience. Facebook, on the other hand, has had both the audience and the advertiser base all along. Now that they’re rolling out the technology, LBS advertising (via Facebook apps, of course) shouldn’t be too far behind.

3. Foursquare & Gowalla condemned to mediocrity

In a nutshell, Facebook Places won’t kill off these services completely. But it’ll hinder their growth potential and dash any acquisition hopes they might have had (that is, at least any hopes of Facebook acquiring them).

On one hand, many users will simply choose not to integrate their current LBS network (e.g. Foursquare) with their Facebook network. We’ve already seen this in how many users use Twitter very differently than they do their Facebook status updates. So these pre-existing LBS networks will probably retain an entrenched user base.

On the other hand, these incumbent LBS networks will probably have trouble growing their existing user base. Given Facebook’s scale and reach, for example, many users will discover Facebook Places before they discover Foursquare or Gowalla. These users, then, will probably be less likely to see the value in joining a separate LBS-only network.

You see, just like Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla are more of individual features than stand alone social networks. This much is evident in how Facebook Places is usurping their entirely functionality as a mere feature.

So these networks will continue to be relevant, but only marginally so and for what will be a stagnant if loyal user base.

Taming the wild wild web

The Internet is in its 20s. It’s starting to grow up and past the awkward, experimental years of its teens. It’s time for the Internet to get down to business.  Companies can no longer launch just to say they did so, but they will launch to have an answer to their investors’ questions of, “How will you make money?”.  Part of that maturity will lead to an increased competition between close competitors and there will be attrition.

So while Google and Apple try to fence us in at the OS level, Facebook seems to be moving to middle-man them (and might be working on their own OS). After all, if users only use your OS to run someone else’s apps, who really controls those users? Facebook clearly intends to address that weakness.

Jambool, creator of Social Gold and former provider of virtual currency for Facebook games and web apps, was sold to Google for a reported $70 million. This follows the trend of game and social app providers LabPixies and Slide we covered here.

In a post about the Slide acquisition, I discussed how Facebook, which originally welcomed developers in 2007 with open arms by dangling the possibility of riches, changed the game and pulled the power back in, away from developers. But why did developers originally flock there? In a blog post, Paul Allen called it the “true spirit of Wikinomics”, explaining:

“Mark Zuckerberg made three big announcements. 1) Applications can be deeply integrated with Facebook 2) Distribution of the applications will occur through the network, and 3) The business opportunity Facebook is providing will give 100% of advertising revenue (for third party applications) and 100% of transaction revenue to the application developers.”

That move had a huge impact. First Round Capital, a venture capital firm, describes this step: “By providing a clear roadmap – and business opportunity – for the widget makers, Facebook has just increased its virtual R&D budget by over $250 million dollars.” First Round correctly predicted that companies like Slide, RockYou, and other developers would enrich the user experience and likely enrich Facebook.

One such company, Jambool, took on the task of building a virtual currency business on Facebook, facilitating the buying and selling of virtual goods and services for application developers. This gained them some traction with other app developers and helped to build a growing business.

But that was the past, and now, as Facebook has grown in size and influence, it has changed the rules. Just as Slide, RockYou, and others have seen their fortunes wane as Facebook grew more powerful Jambool literally had  the rug pulled out from under them once Facebook introduced credits and negotiated deals where these credits would be the exclusive virtual currency on the site. It’s no mystery then that Jambool was snapped up by Google.  Like Slide before them, Jambool’s market valuation and market viability took a hit when Facebook changed the game, making them more likely to embrace an acquisition by Google.

This expands the Google fold to include game makers, experts in viral widgets, social advertising, expression tools, and now virtual currency. What’s next? Who else has been hurt by Facebook changing the game? What gaps need to be filled in Google’s social strategy?

While there are many utility apps and games that fit the bill, the one missing piece are offers – the trend where users don’t pay directly for points, credits, or virtual goods directly, but instead they do tasks, trial products, or spend money on other things that get them what they want.

The two most obvious candidates in this space are OfferPal, which was flying high until the scamville problem we covered here and the choice by Facebook to use TrialPay and PeanutLabs for their offers. This dramatically cut OfferPal’s profile and instantly cast doubt on how big they could become, and now, with a reduced valuation but solid technology implementation, Google could pick them up and round out their portfolio. However, while OfferPal is one obvious choice, Google could also choose TrialPay – a successful, and less controversial, but smaller provider in the offer space. If Google was willing to be aggressive, they could buy TrialPay, which is the favored integration partner for Facebook and currently the main provider of offers that yield Facebook credits. Such a move, at the right time, could not only give Google a solid technology and team, but also temporarily disrupt Facebook’s ability to leverage offers for credits.

Google is building an army of technology,  social tools, and people to challenge Facebook’s dominance in social media. While it has successfully executed on many technologies, it’s only now buying the companies with the traction, experience, and the mindset to put the social back in Google. The only remaining questions are around their ability to they integrate the recently acquired companies and if/how they will move into the offers market.

Search engines have grown in the past few years and with that, even the way they index and rank websites has also changed. In the past, all one needed to do to get ranked for a certain keyword was place Meta tags on your pages. Over a period of time, Meta tags were seen as no longer useful because they produced results that weren’t relevant. In today’s world, these tags aren’t as useful. These days, the search engines have gotten firm on their rules and regulations. This is exactly why you should know the importance of link building and why you need to get high quality backlinks to your site to rank well. Google and the other major search engines have a number of criteria that they require in order to judge a page’s quality, but the biggest one is how many backlinks that website has as well as how relevant they are. You will soon learn a few good link building tricks that will assist you with ranking higher with the search engines. Which is exactly what I do for my websites Which is exactly what I do for my sites goedkoopste autoverzekering and goedkope autoverzekeringen and makes them succeed

A link building method that’s out of the box thinking, and isn’t used by many people, is to make a widget, tool, template or theme that can be used on others for their websites. There are many developers and designers that can create a basic app or widget for you that can be used on others’ social networking and other websites. You could start by handing this code to other webmasters in your niche with a credit link that directs back to your site. It can be a nice way to receive exposure and get links from significant sites at the same time.

Another great thing you can do is use backlinks from only those sites that offer help in finding you as far as the search engines are concerned. Have no idea what that means? If you are a novice to search engine optimization, it may appear odd that Google sometimes forgoes links even though they are trendy. A “no follow” tag causes this, which is how site owners tell Google spiders not to use their links.

That’s why anyone practicing SEO will want to know what “no follow” and “do follow” means. Does it make sense to link build for all that time only to get ignored by Google? There are free implements online that will let you know if a page has no follow tags or not.

You can also hold contents on your website where you attempt to attract anchor texts from bloggers in your subject. While holding contests is a great way to get anchor texts, it should not be abused because too many backlinks can be a bad thing.

So, if getting higher in the search engines is your goal and it’s always eluded you, now’s the time to go after it. Begin the effort required to build your site’s links and slowly you’ll notice your site gaining the pinnacle spot for your niche.

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