While the site becomes the largest player in the US display ad market

May 12, 2010 10:40 GMT  ·  By

Facebook is stirring up all sorts of controversies over the privacy of its users, most recently over the new tools the company introduced. This is nothing new for Facebook and it doesn’t look like it’s affecting the social network in any way. In fact, it seems that the only way for Facebook to go is up. The social network is announcing that the social plugins it introduced less than a month ago have already been implemented on 100,000 sites. In the meantime, its share of the US display ad market has just surpassed Yahoo’s.

“We launched Facebook Connect in late 2008 as the original initiative to help websites and other applications integrate Facebook Platform. In a little over one year, more than 250,000 sites are using our APIs to provide social context in their products,” Facebook’s Justin Osofsky wrote.

“[S]ocial plugins emerged as a lightweight way for both developers and users to benefit. Now just one line of HTML turns on the ability for users to engage with content through the Like button, and see their friends' actions through the Activity Feed and Recommendations plugins. More than 100,000 sites have already integrated social plugins,” he added.

Integrating a Like button is a lot easier than using Facebook Connect for authentication, but, for Facebook, these simple social plugins are just as important, maybe even more so. Facebook Connect is widely considered a success, yet it reached its state in a year and a half.

The new social plugins look set to move past 250,000 installs in a few months and who knows how the number will evolve from there. With Facebook, which is closing in on 500 million users, no number should be too surprising.

And the business side is also starting to take shape. Facebook is said to have taken in about 500 million in 2009 and is set to double that this year. Already, it is serving the biggest number of display ads in the US, according to the latest comScore numbers. Facebook served 176.3 billion display ads in the first three months of the year, while Yahoo just 131.6 billion. Microsoft served 60.2 billion. For Yahoo and Microsoft, these numbers include just the display ads on their own proprieties. Both companies have very profitable ad-syndication businesses, which account for a big chunk of their ad-sales revenue.