I ran across this Google ad put on by well-known brand and (ostensibly) Facebook partner, Blockbuster. Apparently, you can’t put the word “Facebook” in an ad on Google and have to say “Face book” according to this particular promotion. Seems a bit ridiculous, don’t you think?

The ad links to http://www.blockbuster.com/movieclique, the Movieclique Facebook app site on Blockbuster.com… and ironically I saw this ad on a Facebook app itself, Scrabulous. So much for having a tight relationship with a major brand I guess?

Wow, we did some analysis on the Facebook numbers according to Facebook vs. according to comScore and when it gets to older visitors (i.e. over age 35), where comScore Media Metrix says 13.6 million people aged 35+ visited Facebook.com in October compared to Facebook’s figure of 1.256 million (!). Check out our post here on CPM Advisors.

According to this AP story, some people are still finding the Facebook Beacon stuff a bit freaky. It’s still pretty early in the game, though. I’m sure we’ll get a lot more user feedback in the coming months, some bad and some undoubtedly good. What would be great is seeing any actual efficacy data which I fear will take a lot longer.

I’ll post some details shortly, but I’m doing some testing of the new Facebook advertising system. They seem to be very quick to take down ads that are against their guidelines… unfortunately they’re not so kind as to tell you what guideline you have violated, they leave it to you to determine:

This ad has been disabled and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances. Generally, we disable an ad if it violates our Terms of Service or Advertising Guidelines. Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations that have been deemed abusive. Please review our Terms and Guidelines if you have further questions.

Stay tuned for further details and results of this experiment…

I think it’s a bit naive to be dismissive of the “silly apps” such as those that dominate the Facebook app world. After all, this is a very new medium, the Facebook ethos is mostly communications-oriented with a semi-serious college-style bent, and everyone is experimenting and trying new things out. Quite a few app creators have been able to establish rapid critical mass, such as you can when you add 1mm new users in a week, but we really haven’t seen very much fungible liquid monetary value created in the app world yet. That’s okay.

I don’t think OpenSocial brings that automatically, but the number of possible partners and bits of data expand,  and de facto standards reduce the risk of creating orphan applications, and increases the ability to port them to multiple platforms. I don’t really think that the kinds of “serious” apps that are going to get built change that much; I think it’s more a function of time until those things are built anyway. What I’m more interested in is the “emergent privacy dilution” (a theme that seems to be bubbling to the surface currently when you overlap the behavioral targeting attempts by online ad companies with the increasing aggregation and subtle but complex interactions of consumer data) we’re going to see from these things getting stitched together. Everyone is going to follow the money, and right now the conventional wisdom says more aggregation is better and means more CPM revenue.

I have my doubts, but for now, I’ll keep playing with the silly apps and eagerly hold my breath for the serious ones we’re sure to see roundhouse kicking us from just over the horizon.

Public service ads (PSAs) - these are what run on websites when they don’t have any paying ads to show. Now it’s pretty hard to not have *any* ad that will pay you at least a couple of cents per thousand impressions out there, so when you see these types of ads showing up a lot you have to ask a few questions of the site, if it’s monitoring and monetizing its ad inventory very well. In the attached picture, on Facebook, is a PSA and I’ve been seeing a lot there recently. I’m not a very high-volume Facebook user so I don’t expect its because their adserver thinks I’m a terrible non-person who shouldn’t get any paying ad shown to me. But seeing a lot of these like I am today leads me to question how seriously Facebook is treating it’s advertising business, and of course as I’ve asked before - whether it has to worry about it all.