Item — HN Reader

"This will require them going from a niche advertiser to taking over a significant fraction of all worldwide ad revenue, this is no small feat."

But it is small for Facebook. They already have the footprint with over 9 million sites all running the Like button. Utilizing that same JS they can have a 'Social Adsense' revenue stream overnight. They can potentially grab the search queries from the headers and have implicit and explicit data to target off of (the holy grail of targeting).

1 comments

And that may allow them to increase their ad revenue, perhaps even a lot. But is it enough to take control of fully 1/10th to 1/5th of all advertising spending for all media (print, television, radio, billboards, and online) for the entire world? Imagining that capturing that much of the market is a sure thing is just silly. Are they going to be able to get circa $20 billion in ad revenue a year from the Asian market? Within the next 10 years? How?

By getting more global marketshare and by maximizing the ARPU for North American users (credits & payments). They can get more global marketshare by striking a deal with China (~500M internet users) and increased growth in Russia (~100M).

They are also going to be tapping into a new market (mobile advertising) which is a market that is seeing 1.5x-2x yoy growth. Open Graph has already been proven to propel apps that use it to the top 10 of the Apple App Store. With apps paying $1 to $5 per user, Facebook is an interesting position where they can be a HUGE channel for these app companies to spend their money.