 "'Facebook plans to sell TV-style ads for $2.5 million each'")
Facebook Inc, seeking to break the long-held dominance of television over advertising budgets, plans to sell TV-style commercials on its site for as much as $2.5 million a day, two people familiar with the matter said.
The world’s largest social-networking site, which was co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg and has 1.15 billion members, expects to start offering 15-second spots to advertisers later this year, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the plans aren’t public.
The move would follow efforts by Facebook’s online rivals to capture ad dollars that have traditionally gone to TV networks. Google Inc began funding original content channels on its YouTube video-sharing site in recent years, giving it a more curated venue for commercials. A year ago, AOL Inc started HuffPost Live, a CNN-like video stream running five days a week.
“Every night, 88 million to 100 million people are actively using Facebook during prime-time TV hours in the US alone,” Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said last week on a conference call about second-quarter results.
Elisabeth Diana, a spokeswoman for Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, declined to comment on its advertising plan.
While the social network already allows advertisers to upload videos to their Facebook page and then broadcast them to a user’s news feed, the new service would let marketers buy their way directly into a person’s feed with a 15-second pitch, according to the people. That’s typically the minimum length of a television commercial.
At 15 seconds, the ads also would be the same length as Facebook’s Instagram videos — a feature that was added to the company’s photo-sharing service last month. That means the commercials would come in a familiar format for users.
The commercials will initially be sold on a full-day basis and can only be targeted to users based on age and gender, according to the people. That would be a break from how ad units are currently sold on Facebook, which lets marketers target ads based on location and areas of interest — data points that television networks generally don’t offer.
The world’s largest social-networking site, which was co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg and has 1.15 billion members, expects to start offering 15-second spots to advertisers later this year, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the plans aren’t public.
The move would follow efforts by Facebook’s online rivals to capture ad dollars that have traditionally gone to TV networks. Google Inc began funding original content channels on its YouTube video-sharing site in recent years, giving it a more curated venue for commercials. A year ago, AOL Inc started HuffPost Live, a CNN-like video stream running five days a week.
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With Facebook, the idea would be to capitalise on the millions of users who actively check the site on a daily basis, including during the prime-time hours coveted by television advertisers. As of last quarter, 61 per cent of Facebook members were using the site daily — a number that has risen despite management predictions that it would decline.
“Every night, 88 million to 100 million people are actively using Facebook during prime-time TV hours in the US alone,” Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said last week on a conference call about second-quarter results.
Elisabeth Diana, a spokeswoman for Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, declined to comment on its advertising plan.
While the social network already allows advertisers to upload videos to their Facebook page and then broadcast them to a user’s news feed, the new service would let marketers buy their way directly into a person’s feed with a 15-second pitch, according to the people. That’s typically the minimum length of a television commercial.
At 15 seconds, the ads also would be the same length as Facebook’s Instagram videos — a feature that was added to the company’s photo-sharing service last month. That means the commercials would come in a familiar format for users.
The commercials will initially be sold on a full-day basis and can only be targeted to users based on age and gender, according to the people. That would be a break from how ad units are currently sold on Facebook, which lets marketers target ads based on location and areas of interest — data points that television networks generally don’t offer.