14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has just revealed plans to expand its advertising options, a welcomed piece of news for any would-be investors in the company that is about to go public. The new ad units are nothing surprising, mobile ads are coming and so are ads in the timeline, similar to promoted tweets in the timeline.
One ad unit that did seem a bit peculiar though was the logout page ad, a full page display ad. Big ads like this aren't necessarily new, Yahoo has been doing this type of big display as on its login page.
But a logout page ad seemed somewhat of an odd choice, most people don't even waste a glance at that page. Facebook knows what it's doing though. One idea that sounds intriguing is Facebook use on public computers.
People log out and leave the computer with the full page ad on the screen for everyone that walks by to see.
But Facebook's first logout ad, which has already been spotted in the wild despite this type of ad being expected to roll out next month, is an even better example of how these ads could be useful.
It's an ad for Bing, the search engine's homepage is fully recreated on the Facebook logout page including the search box. It makes perfect sense, a lot of people are going to do a search after they log out of Facebook.
With a search box waiting for them, they may end up doing a Bing search rather than using the Google which may be the default in their browser.
Facebook revealed that 37 million people log out of Facebook each day in the US, 105 million in a month. That's 105 million different people seeing that page at least once, the page view count should be much higher. It's prime real estate and Facebook knows it.