Facebook’s New Mobile Advertising Network Now Open For Business

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Facebook’s mobile advertising network, which allows ads to be placed not just throughout the social media website but also in third-party mobile apps, is getting set to expand, various media outlets reported on Tuesday.
According to Cade Metz of Wired.com, the social network has extended an invite to all mobile developers and publishers to join the Facebook Audience Network. The network, which launched in January, allows developers and publishers to sign up to display Facebook ads in their apps in exchange for a piece of the revenue, he added.
In an update posted Tuesday, Facebook’s Tanya Chen said that the network, which she claimed offered “a quick and easy way to connect these apps with the more than 1.5 million active advertisers on Facebook,” had been “optimized… to improve performance” in recent months and was now being formally launched to developers and publishers worldwide.

Image above courtesy of Facebook
Chen further touted the network’s effectiveness by referencing comments from gaming app developer Glu and music sharing app Shazam. Chris Akhavan, President of Publishing at Glu Mobile, said that their CPM with Facebook’s Audience Network was twice as good as with the service’s competition, and Shazam reported a 37 percent increase of revenue from ad networks since joining.
Furthermore, David Cohen of AllFacebook noted that Walgreens witnessed click-through rates increase at least fourfold during its test of the Facebook Audience Network. He also reports that HarperCollins reported a 16 percent increase in impressions. Game developer Machine Zone also said its cost per install was down and that it had found a new audience for its products.
As Metz explained, promoting success stories like this is part of Facebook’s sales pitch that revenue obtained by using their network “will be higher than what developers and publishers could get from other mobile ad networks, because the Facebook network lets advertisers target users on mobile apps in much the same way they target users on Facebook proper. Advertisers, you see, will pay a premium for such targeting.”
The Wired.com business and enterprise editor added that the social network is looking to secure a greater share of the $140 billion digital advertising market – despite already holding a solid lead over Google and other less prominent companies. Since Facebook has access to so much personal data about its users, he explained, it is able to more closely match ads based on age, gender, and interests and can charge more for those ads as a result.
While Facebook assures users that ad matches are made anonymously and that no new forms of targeting will be used as part of the network, Zach Miners of IDG News Service noted that “any broader leveraging of Facebook data is bound to raise privacy concerns among some people.”
“Similar questions around privacy arose last week with the rollout of Facebook’s Atlas ad server. Atlas also uses Facebook data to deliver ads outside the social network, though those ads may not appear on Facebook at all,” he added. Atlas, which is separate from the Audience Network, allows companies to secure ads from various sources and display them across a plethora of other websites and services, Metz noted.