Facebook Places: 36 Hrs Later
Well its been 36 hours more or less since Facebook announced their new Places features, and a solid day in which I’ve been able to get it working on my iPhone. So I wanted to post a quick follow up.
- first of all if you don’t already read The Next Web and their coverage of location, you really should… they did a lot of posts on Facebook Places, full of great insights. I thought the one titled “Why I deleted foursquare for good” was particularly good. That and pretty much all of Greg Sterling’s Screenwerks blog are great sources of info Read more
Metaplaces: Mobile Social Networks or as they would say in California, Mobile Social Graphs
So there was a whole session yesterday focusing on the location based social networks and essentially how the hell they’re going to make any money. I am not sure why folks expect that this has been figured out on the mobile side of things when the 800lb gorilla’s in the web world is still just figuring things out there, but alas. On a related note, it’s worth checking out the breakdown of how Facebook currently makes money today from an interesting post from SAI.
While there were few direct answers here, the read between the lines answer seemed to be that “we’re not sure but we’re experimenting with a bunch of different things”… premium services add-on’s seemed to be a popular option. But it was also clear that regular old banner ads just didn’t seem to be cutting it, bringing in maybe just a handful of dimes per thousand… which when combined with a respectable, but not overwhelming, audience of a few hundred thousand users, wouldn’t amount to much. One of the speakers did throw out that with some of the geo targeting qualifiers, they saw CPMs jump into the few dollars range. Overall it sounded like some of the core economics around the costs of location dips and maps made it challenging to make it work on the pure low network advertising cpm’s model, so CPMs needed to make it into the dollars to make it work.
I was particularly impressed by Rob Lawson’s presentation on behalf of BrightKite which earlier this year merged with Limbo. In the world of digital advertising, it wasn’t necessarily that what they were doing was amazingly original, but you got the feeling that they understand the advertising world and they seemed to be doing the basic blocking and tackling to move ahead… first they combined two strong companies to get enough audience to make it worthwhile for advertisers to notice, then they hired five dedicated sales guys who either already got it or were trained to understand the space and what makes it unique.
The moderator of the panel Claudio Schapsis keeps a running tab on all the new location based social networks popping up, and its getting to be quite long these days. Not surprising some of these guys are coming to the realization that it will become tougher and tougher to compete and grow as a stand alone consumer destination, and are instead switching gears to help bring the goodness of location awareness to people who already have large existing networks.
-
Sponsored Links
