Archive for March 2009
Where have all the kids gone?
The Facebook ad platform has stopped accepting any ads, it seems, for ages 13 and up. Your ad, if you select the from age to be “any” or “13″ will default to 18 and upwards. Even if that’s from 18 to 17.
Could be nothing more than another glitch, or it could smack of something more sinister. Either way it highlights soem of the discrepancies in the marketplace right now.
By not allowing advertising to under-18s, the CPMs naturally rise if your intended target is “all” users. Media cost for over 18′s is 2-3 times more expensive than it is for children. In the UK at least, anyway.
There are 2 million UK users on Facebook aged 17 and under (about 11%), and the estimated CPM to target them is 0.05 – 0.10 USD. Compare that to the over 18s market, of which there are 15.5 million people, but more poignantly the estimated range of CPMs is significantly higher: 0.16-0.21 USD.
Is this the first sign of scarcity in the (adult) social networking market, as CPMs start nudging upwards? US inventory has been at a premium for some time now, and now the UK seems to be catching up.
Is MySpace’s time over?
comscore reports a flat lining of traffic while Google AdPlanner demonstrates some of their major markets, and a measure of traffic from all countries on some apparently drastic downward trends.
MySpace traffic in the UK
The pattern in the UK is reflected by traffic in the publishers’ home turf too.
MySpace traffic in the US
And without going through every territory around the world, the chart for All countries (obviously influenced by the US chart) shows a similar pattern
Having been the subject of repeated news stories regarding it’s traffic volumes (compete.com reported that US traffic for MySpace was overtaken by Facebook back in Dec 08), what is their next move to retain users?
