Social Networking & Advertising - The Best Is Yet To Come

Writing by Brick Marketing on Monday, 24 of March , 2008 at 11:35 am

You’ve no doubt heard the complaints that advertising on the social networking websites doesn’t get the return expected by online marketers. High pageviews, low click-thru rates.

However, there’s another way of looking at this: social networking websites can deliver a demographically focused audience that is not widely available online. Even offline, only TV can deliver this type of audience.

In February, the 25 top social networking sites put 155 million unique visitors face-to-face with advertisers. MySpace, Facebook & Classmates.com delivered over 70% of that total. Tacking on YouTube and Flickr increases the total to 215 million unique viewers a month. Best estimate for TV is less than 200 million unique viewers per month.

There’s more. According to ComScore Video Metrix, US web users watched over 10 billion videos just in December, 2007. Many of those were soft-pedalling commercials … and many more are ripe to have a short commercial attached to the end.

But the most attractive social networking media feature is the younger demographic with high disposable income, much sought-after by ad agencies and advertisers. It’s too big and too focused an audience for that strong marketing connection to not be made eventually.

Social networking websites may currently be struggling for traditional advertisers, but the signs point to a happy, profitable future for them - together.

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Category: Facebook, Flickr, Myspace, Social Networking, YouTube

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