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google should most definitely be scared. they make something like 90% of their profit from advertising - advertising based on your search query or the context o

google should most definitely be scared. they make something like 90% of their profit from advertising - advertising based on your search query or the context of the page you're reading. facebook's ad platform has the potential to destory them, given they know your so much more about you, your friends, interests etc. is it hard for facebook to launch a search engine, with rankings tweaked via the social graph? not really. is it hard for google to catch up with fb's graph? yes very, but they're trying.

smokinn 17y ago
The difference is the last mile. Google's ads target someone looking for something (which is much more likely to result in a sale) whereas facebook's ads target someone looking to check out his friend's pics from last night's party or the profile of a girl he met recently. Vastly different contexts. Maybe, in the future, facebook will be able to change this, but it's doubtful. At least not on the facebook.com property. There's a very good reason why social network CPMs are consistently the lowest in the entire industry.
- dejb 17y ago
  > There's a very good reason why social network CPMs are consistently the lowest in the entire industry. That's the whole point of the article in my view - Facebook is looking for ways to increase that CPM. If they can do that then they would stand a chance of 'taking over the web'. Yes they probably would have find a way to 'target someone looking for something'. I would estimate that the average user of Facebook is more naive and influence-able in their purchasing than the average Google user which could be a useful advantage.
moultano 17y ago
>google should most definitely be scared. they make something like 90% of their profit from advertising - advertising based on your search query or the context of the page you're reading. facebook's ad platform has the potential to destory them, given they know your so much more about you, your friends, interests etc. I suspect that your query stream is much richer data than everything you've ever done on facebook. >is it hard for facebook to launch a search engine, with rankings tweaked via the social graph? not really. This is dramatically underestimating the difficulty of search. Ranking sites by quality is not hard (in the head at least), and facebook can certainly tweak that well with social data. Ranking pages by relevance to a query is extremely hard.
ntoshev 17y ago
Google can take the approximation of the social graph that they have (in Gmail & Orkut) and improve search results based on that. I doubt they haven't at least tried to estimate how much does this help.

smokinn 17y ago

The difference is the last mile. Google's ads target someone looking for something (which is much more likely to result in a sale) whereas facebook's ads target someone looking to check out his friend's pics from last night's party or the profile of a girl he met recently. Vastly different contexts. Maybe, in the future, facebook will be able to change this, but it's doubtful. At least not on the facebook.com property. There's a very good reason why social network CPMs are consistently the lowest in the entire industry.

dejb 17y ago
> There's a very good reason why social network CPMs are consistently the lowest in the entire industry. That's the whole point of the article in my view - Facebook is looking for ways to increase that CPM. If they can do that then they would stand a chance of 'taking over the web'. Yes they probably would have find a way to 'target someone looking for something'. I would estimate that the average user of Facebook is more naive and influence-able in their purchasing than the average Google user which could be a useful advantage.

moultano 17y ago

>google should most definitely be scared. they make something like 90% of their profit from advertising - advertising based on your search query or the context of the page you're reading. facebook's ad platform has the potential to destory them, given they know your so much more about you, your friends, interests etc. I suspect that your query stream is much richer data than everything you've ever done on facebook. >is it hard for facebook to launch a search engine, with rankings tweaked via the social graph? not really. This is dramatically underestimating the difficulty of search. Ranking sites by quality is not hard (in the head at least), and facebook can certainly tweak that well with social data. Ranking pages by relevance to a query is extremely hard.

ntoshev 17y ago

Google can take the approximation of the social graph that they have (in Gmail & Orkut) and improve search results based on that. I doubt they haven't at least tried to estimate how much does this help.