Online advertising firm AdBrite is set to announce on Tuesday a new program to serve ads for third-party Facebook applications. Considering it a niche “channel” alongside existing AdBrite verticals, the company has launched a new Web-based interface so that Facebook application developers can join the program and make their inventories “instantly available to AdBrite’s large base of advertisers.”
The company saw it as a logical move, AdBrite co-founder Philip Kaplan said in an interview with CNET News.com. “We’ve just had a lot of Facebook applications signing up to use AdBrite,” he said, stressing that AdBrite caters to a “long tail” demographic of many smaller advertisers and Web sites. It already powers the advertisements on Facebook Platform applications as hyped-up as iLike’s music applications and as, well, viral as the “Zombies” and “Pirates” apps.
Currently, widget-focused advertising firms are limited to companies like the start-up SocialMedia, but that’s about to change, considering the kind of buzz that social-network advertising, a nascent sector of the market, has been raking in. Facebook, after all, has rapidly impending plans to unveil a massive ad strategy. According to the terms of the newly announced deal with Microsoft, the Redmond, Wash.-based megalith holds the rights to all third-party ad sales on Facebook proper, but that leaves the developer application pages free for the taking–developers are responsible for their own advertising, and can keep all of the revenue. With its new Facebook app strategy, AdBrite is trying to exploit what it sees as a fairly open niche.
Some critics still say ads will never reach their full potential on social networks–we’ll just have to see how it all unfolds.
