Facebook Social Advertising Part II

I asked Khalid today if he was aware of his name and picture being used to advertise for Veritas on Facebook. To my surprise, he said no. He became a "fan" of Veritas to get a 10% discount on their GMAT prep courses. My gut reaction is that people will not be too pleased to see that they are being used in advertising without being compensated (and I don't think he sees the 10% discount as comp). The better question is: how much would be ample compensation? Will we see "Facebook celebrities" in the future? This could get really interesting.

YouTube pays out $1 million to users

http://newteevee.com/2008/04/16/youtube-pays-users-1-million/

A couple VERY relevant quotes:

Break a Leg's Yuri Baranovsky said he’d collected $1,600 for more than 2 million views on YouTube.

YouTube partner videos are the only ones on the site for which YouTube shows overlay ads, which it says it tries to sell for a $20 CPM.

So, let me get this straight... YouTube receives $20 CPM for overlay ads, yet pays its partners $0.80 CPM. The scary thing is that this is probably a better deal than what the users are getting on Metacafe, which pays a $5 CPM but has 1/20 of the pageviews of YouTube (see below).

Facebook Social Advertising

I couldn't help but notice the following ad on Facebook today. My friend Khalid recently signed up to be a fan of Veritas GMAT Prep, and is now being featured in a Facebook ad.

NY Times Article about Yahoo!'s Display Ad Exchange

Yahoo! has begun to publicly talk about the display ad exchange that I heard about while interning there this past summer. They are calling it AMP, though the article doesn't mention when it will be launched. I wrote in an earlier blog post that this advertising project will basically determine the future of Yahoo!, and it is probably a major reason why the board has been reluctant to accept Microsoft's offer.

Advertising: The Future of Yahoo!

I met with Chris Jaffe today, who runs the Advertising User Experience Division here at Yahoo!. We talked about where he thinks the best opportunities are at Y!, and where the future of Y! lies. Not surprisingly, he believes that advertising is the place to be, and admits that in the past Y! placed it's B level engineers in advertising (with A level in product development). Now he is seeing this trend reverse as Yahoo! enters its "teenage years." In his meetings with Sue Decker, they have both agreed that the future of Y! is moving away from its owned content (yahoo.com) and into advertising partnerships with content owners (Ford, P&G, NBC).

One area that he believes Google is much farther behind than Y! is in TV advertising--currently advertisers on TV barely know what demographic is watching their ad, and in the near future Yahoo! will be providing data that is just as detailed as what is available for online ads.

Chris also discussed the area where he believes Google is still killing Yahoo!: scalability. All of the advertising tools at Google are automated--they just need to feed the "Adwords fire" and the auctions will take care of themselves. Y! still has a large salesforce, and in his opinion 3/4 of these people are un-needed (saving only the people who deal with Fortune 50 companies). Hopefully I will be able to discuss this in more detail with Robi Ganguly, who is also on my team and working in the division focused on improving scalability.

I believe that Chris truly agrees with the vision of Sue and Jerry here (he said that he has turned down multiple offers in the last 8 months), but he is concerned that they may not be able to deliver in time. In his opinion, if APEX hasn't launched in 18 months and blown away the competition, then Yahoo! is toast. And looking at Panama, this is a legitimate concern.

As for me, he believes that right now is the time to start a company or move into technology--the internet space is established but still moving very quickly, and there are very smart people who have figured out how to be successful (he mentioned Meebo as a great example). He also believes that you can move into consulting at any point in time, and that the experience you get working in the Valley will make you a more intriguing candidate for any job.