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Comment by theli0nheart | Hacker News Reader

Great job Facebook.

However, I don't see Facebook replacing Google as the primary advertising medium on the Internet--ever. Google's power is that its ads can be placed anywhere with no action on the user's end to be targeted appropriately. Adsense is totally plug-and-play.

To compete with Google, Facebook needs to find a better way to syndicate its ads across the Internet. Unfortunately for them, however, all their advertising power is stuck inside their network. You need to log into Facebook to get targeted ads, which is a huge barrier for Facebook to overcome.

We'll see how it plays out, but IMHO Facebook needs to rethink its advertising strategy to even begin competing with the likes of Google.

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While Facebook may know more about its users, Google still knows more about what the user wants right that moment. The average person looking for a TV is more likely to search for one on Google than post about it on their profile (or tweet about it, for that matter).

I'm also curious if the people that spend the most time on Facebook are the people who earn Facebook the most money. It seems like the high school and college students who can spend all their time browsing the site are also the people least likely to spend money. Does anyone have any insight into the relative value of different demographics?

Young high-school/college demographics spend a lot of money, overall -- look how much TV/movie/radio media is directed at them. (And, they form brand loyalties that last through their later peak income years.)

I assume a brand-awareness ad for Nike is somewhat less valuable than an ad which actually sells a pair of Nikes then and there. Also, TV ads are to a captive audience, who don't have anything else to focus on. Facebook ads live in the margins, which I assume dilutes their utility for reminding people that Nikes are a pretty cool shoe to own.

If I'm looking to buy something and don't know where to get it, I go to Google. So the ads are actually useful to me. I never go to Facebook to search for something I want to buy.

I'm sure many people follow Facebook ads, but I'm not one of them. Especially since they are mostly trying to trick people. Like showing random pictures in the ads that have no meaning to the actual product.

Facebook ads are less compelling from the supply side, but in some cases more impressive from the demand side. Companies like Groupon make extensive use of Facebook's demographic targeting, for example, and local advertising is only going to grow over the next five years.

Facebook is also finally moving into virtual currency, with the launch of Facbeook credits. Did you know Zynga is the second largest PayPal merchant after eBay itself?

Also the stupid "Are you 31 years old? Then you can get a FREE <product>"

I wonder how many people seriously think that the adverts aren't pulling your age out of your profile. Enough to make it work I'm sure though.

This is interesting. I see some people tweeting / facebook status updating saying things like "Any recommendations for a good TV?" or perhaps, a cryptic ... "shopping for HDTV with 3d @ bestbuy".

The right language parsing makes these incredibly high value targets for TV ads, review sites, etc.

Probably a few years down the road, or alternatively FB just needs to get a few mutant geniuses locked in a room for six months.

I could see Facebook extending on facebook connect on this front:

For sites that had facebook connect available for login, they would be able to serve ads customized on a per-user basis - provided the underlying http ad request can include some sort of unique per-session hash, instead of being funneled through the traditional facebook connect API.

Their problem, of course, comes with attempting to monetize areas of their site which do not require a facebook connect-enabled login to continue.

I'd be frightened of this for a few reasons:

- FBC may become required - not optional - on many sites which do not currently require it. The flip side of this is it forces the sites which wish to fully monetize to actually come up with interesting and unique ways to tie into the user's social graph (in order to drive uptake of FBC as a protocol). On the other hand, it provides single sign on - which many, many users have been clamoring for (even if they didn't know it), for years.

- I dislike the FBC protocol, and wish they had gone MySpace's route with OpenSocial. It's much more sane to deal with. If the FBC protocol and widget mechanism were more sane, it would drive up adoption on many current platforms that don't currently offer it.

- This potentially has even greater security and privacy concerns than Google has ever had to deal with. This may turn out to be a good thing.

It's not just about syndicating ads. If anything syndicating ads is just another way to expand reach. Facebook has plenty of reach on it's own site, with 450 million users and counting.

Facebook might have nice structured data about demographics and other user information but dollar for dollar investing in Google Adwords is exponentially more effective then Facebook. The reason being advertising on Facebook is more akin to advertising on TV, people using the service aren't searching for anything and ads feel exactly like ads. Adwords works because they actually help people find what they're looking for.

Facebook may have achieved several hundred million dollars in advertising revenue (and search deals with Microsoft) the last few years, but if they are going to convince people to invest a billion dollars, or at Google's level several tens of billions of dollars, in advertising dollars, they need to figure out a way to make advertising on Facebook at least as effective as Google.

I for one, simply don't see that happening - ever. I see Facebook's destiny as a very low margin potentially public social network company, but the next Google? That's a long long loooooong shot.

Something like 90% of Google's net revenue comes from properties Google owns.

I don't see Facebook replacing Google as the primary advertising medium on the Internet--ever.

'Ever' is a long time.

The key issue is that right now, Google is a better place to start a commerce-oriented (and especially high-dollar commerce-oriented) task, and reveal (by your queries) your intent in a way advertisers can hook into.

But, with enough work and experimentation, could Facebook become a better place to start such tasks, and reveal such intent?

It's not out of the question, and Facebook should have internal experiments trying to create -- and be on the lookout for acquisitions of -- features that bring the initiation of ad-friendly commerce-oriented tasks into their platform.

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