14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is moving ahead with its plans to become profitable this year, with a reported expected revenue of $500 million. That is far less than what MySpace is pulling in for the moment but Facebook is slowly building better advertising options that should appeal to many advertisers. Part of the increasing ad portfolio the social network is introducing new targeted ad filters on top of the new features introduced last week.
The first filter is “Connection Targeting,” which allows advertisers to specifically target users who are either fans of their pages, users of any of their Facebook apps, members of any groups they created or attending any of their events. This could prove very powerful provided it is used correctly, as it would allow them to use this as a notification system or just to engage the users who are already connected to their brands, organizations or products.
The next filter is rather self-explanatory, “Multiple Country Filtering,” allowing advertisers to target their campaigns at certain countries, up to 25, as up until now they had to create separate ad campaigns for every country. Finally, another self-explanatory filter is “Birthday Targeting” which could be very powerful and not that limited in its reach when you consider that Facebook has well over 200 million users worldwide.
Facebook’s safer approach has proven the right one for the company. Not flooding the users with ads covering half the page may not be as rewarding financially but it's a big part of the reason why Facebook is the biggest social network in the world and still going strong while MySpace user numbers, views and visitors are stagnating or even dropping lately. While the ad market for social networks may actually shrink this year, it is expected to grow tremendously in the coming years with Facebook becoming the biggest earner.