Facebook Opens Its Mobile Ad “Audience Network” To All Advertisers And Apps
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/07/fac...e-network-ads/
After announcing its mobile ad network at f8 in April, Facebook today officially launched “Audience Network” and started letting any advertiser buy and any third-party app host ads powered by its targeting data. The big new detail is that Audience Network isn’t a separate set of ad inventory from what’s available in Facebook’s own apps and site with a direct buying interface. Instead, it’s “a simple way to extend Facebook advertising buys across mobile apps to increase relevancy for people, yield for publishers, and results for advertisers” using the same Facebook biographical, interest, and activity targeting data, according to Audience Network’s product manager Sriram Krishnan.
Similar to the web and mobile-based “ad network” Atlas that Facebook just relaunched, Audience Network is a way for Facebook to earn money by leveraging its personal data trove for targeting without cluttering its own service with any more ads. Its gives developers an easy option for monetization by hosting Facebook’s ads, while letting advertisers get in front of more people in a certain demographic more frequently than if they could only reach people on Facebook.
Until now, each dollar Facebook earned meant annoying its own users with more ads. This created a natural cap on Facebook’s revenue unless it wanted to pester us so much that we stopped visiting. Now it can sit back and cash in on all the targeting data it’s collected.
Audience Network will put Facebook into more direct competition with Google’s AdMob, Yahoo’s Flurry, and Twitter’s MoPub for mobile advertising dollars. 62% of Facebook’s ad revenue, or $1.66 billion, came from mobile last quarter largely thanks to developers buying News Feed ads promoting their apps. Now Facebook will be able to gobble up more developer spend because it has more places to put the ads. eMarketer says Facebook took 16.5% of worldwide mobile ad revenues in 2013 and expects it that to increase to 20.4% this year while Google drops from 46.4% to 44.6%.
If Audience Network is a hit with developers and advertisers, it could be a huge boon to Facebook’s revenue while also improving its relationships with its most important partners. And if Facebook ads annoy you, at least now it has a way to grow its business without stuffing more of them into your News Feed.