Last year was the year of social networks, namely Facebook has been its star. With an average yearly growth rate of 550% .
World wide faeebook is closing on myspace #1 lead in social networking arena to equal it to around 100 million unique visits a month. It is in Alexa’s top ten, and it is number one world wide photo sharing website more than flickr.
In the arab world facebook become number on social network beating Hi5. Facebook now is on top 5 most visited websites in the arab world which include: Google, yahoo, msn, and maktoob.
On the business professional SN front, linkedIn and Xing has grown a lot, Linkedin remain a leader with around 17 millions profile, with a growth rate at an average of 182 percent yearly.
Facebook and Bebo charges only 13 cents per thousand times that an ad is ‘served,’ or CPM. Yahoo’s average CPM is estimated at $13. Video ads on Myspace is $25 per thousand showings while CBS charges $50 and NBC charges as much as $75 for the same number of views.
Why is consumers Social networking Ad rate is lower, I think because Advertising in consumer social networks is less effective to other web sites.
According to an online marketer in the Arab world who ran ads in faebook, facebook click through rate (CTR) is the lowest in the industry, the obvious reason is that users are busy interacting with their friends than looking into ads, the other reason is that ad location is not visible to the user, they are even on the left side under the app menu or at the bottom of the page.
Another evidence is Google executives complains about how hard it is to monetize social networking traffic.
Fox Interactive gets 27 percent of its revenue from an ad deal between Google and MySpace forged in August 2006. A deal in which Rupert Murdoch gets $900 million, the guaranteed revenue Google promised MySpace through 2010. So now google is loosing money with myspace ad deal.
Contextual text ads to users’ Personal profiles are not as effective as contextual text ads on search or a news website.
On the other hand LinkedIn has a CPM rate of $75. why? LinkedIn caters to a professional business audience and so the advertisers have a narrower business audience.
LinkedIn also has contextual text ads from google’s ad sense, which I found interesting where I some times I click on these links. Because they are related to things in my profile and business interest, some thing I would like to increase my knowledge about.sometimes locate a competitor.
How many times did an ad got your attention and how many times did you click an ad across social networks.
Please leave your comments and tell us about
your ad experience across social networks………………….
UP DATE: there are new reports that backup my assertions, and i will post them soon.
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