Facebook and the Media/Advertisers.

There’s this application on Facebook that supposedly tells you how much your profile is worth. I added it and it didn’t work. It says that by taking your number of friends, photos, wall posts and other posted items, it can determine how much your page is worth to advertisers. When the article was written, calculations found the average profile to be worth $725. People who are more active with their profile will be “worth more,” and vice versa. But, like I said, the application didn’t work for me.

Regardless, the article makes the point that Facebook is a lucrative way to potentially reach a very specialized set of the population. It’s clear that advertisers have already gotten in on the business; this article shows how advertisers can use a profile’s “Personal Interests” to make their services more individual. If this seems like exploitation of your privacy, you should know that advertisers use this technique to control not only the ads you see on Facebook.com, but also the ads you might see on a completely random website.

From the article; “…if you’ve listed in your profile that one of your favorite bands is Coldplay, you might see an ad for their CD or concert tickets when browsing a random web site like ESPN. And who might sell these ads? Microsoft, who already has access to tens of thousands of advertisers through a variety of online advertising initiatives within the software giant’s online offerings.”

I include all this info on advertisers because, until now, ads have always been present with the media. Social networking websites are one of the first areas where the advertisers have beat the major media corporations to the punch. Every major media company exists today because of it’s advertisements, but it didn’t start out that way. At first, advertisers needed a newspaper or radio station to reach people; no longer, now Myspace and Facebook have already collected the people. This article talks of why media companies are slow to join the Facebook party. I have no doubts that the media will become much more prevalent in social networking sites. I think it would be awesome to wake up, open my Facebook page, and find breaking news from The Arizona Republic on my news feed right alongside relationship updates and wall posts. It’s only a matter of time I suppose.