As comScore and others have reported, we are spending far more time on social networking sites than on any other sites or web activities today. From eMarketer today:
Time spent on social networking sites is increasing steadily, taking users’ attention away from sites such as portals. According to comScore, the top 20% of social network users visit networking sites 2.4 times per day, on average, and spend 31 minutes on them—twice as long as the same users spend with e-mail or instant messaging. And that, in turn, means more time with ads.
The problem is, this inventory is sub-optimal for display and text advertising. The same article discussed the challenges of low CPM inventory. Users are too engaged in social communications and games to click away on ads. Also, when we are reading about friends, we are not demonstrating intent like we do in a search query, so ad targeting is harder.
The truth is that we do demonstrate intent, authority and endorsement while on social networks. We demonstrate who our closest friends are, we share links to goods and services we like, we click on links shared to us by friends we trust. We throw off all sorts of useful data for ad targeting. But social networking site inventory is not the inventory on which to display such targeted ads.
The solution here is to use social networking data and re-target existing customers, prospects, and friends of prospects. This allows highly relevant ads to be delivered to customers on inventory less likely to be interrupting task-based or conversational behavior. Media6Degrees, a Venrock portfolio company, is doing exactly this. And they are not dependent on a single social network, but instead have amassed a meta view of our connections on the web. They are building custom audiences for brands that are highly scaleable. The 50 or so advertisers who have used them have seen dramatic results. There are others working on the same problem. 33Across and Lotome are focused on a similar problem. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook launch social ads on an AdSense-type distributed platform in the future.
