Three Ways Facebook Can...

Editor’s note: Hussein Fazal is CEO of AdParlor , an ad management and technology company for Facebook campaigns. AdParlor manages over 1 billion daily ad impressions on Facebook for clients such as Ubisoft, SEGA, Groupon, OMD and Starcom. I must say that I have been a little bit disappointed recently in the many , many , many  analysts who have been knocking the Facebook valuation with very limited insight into what is going on with their advertising business. Their revenue potential is as strong as it has ever been and the social network continues to grow its users and roll-out innovative advertising products. While there are many things that Facebook can do to drive revenue related to display, search, and mobile – let’s take a look at three immediate steps Facebook could take to ramp up revenues from its 500 Million+ monthly active users on mobile devices. 1. Show more Sponsored Stories in the mobile news feed – A sponsored story is a piece of news that you would see in your news feed anyways – turned into an ad. It is relevant, social and most people who see a sponsored story wouldn’t even recognize it as an ad. Simply put – sponsored stories work. Looking at campaigns AdParlor has run across numerous verticals show that on average, sponsored stories have a 17% higher click-through-rate and a 38% higher conversion-rate than regular marketplace ads. When sponsored stories were first introduced they were only shown on the right-hand column. They were then rolled out into the news feed on the web version of Facebook. At fmc they announced that they would begin to serve sponsored stories on mobile, and on April 26th it seems to have gone live . However, most users have seen few if any sponsored stories in their mobile news feed as Facebook is slowly rolling this out while monitoring user experience. Facebook can easily flip the switch on this, increasing the volume of sponsored stories it shows in the mobile news feed and increase their mobile revenues. 2- Combining Location & Offers – A while back Facebook attempted to compete with Groupon and other daily deal sites by creating a deals product. They quickly shut that down for multiple reasons – and then re-emerged recently with an offers product. These offers are coupons which any page owner can create for free – and will begin to appear in a user’s news feed on the web. The real benefit will start to roll in when Facebook begins to serve these offers in the news feed on mobile devices to users who are near the store providing the offer. Even though an offer is free to create – if Facebook can leverage location-based mobile offers – page owners will begin to see the ROI and will purchase ads and sponsored stories against these offers to get more distribution beyond what is given for free. Additionally, brands will now have a very clear path to seeing ROI when buying fans. The investment question around the value of growing your fan base – at least for physical location retailers – will be answered. This is sure to increase the ad spend these companies will make on growing their fan base. 3 – Open up mobile device-specific targeting –  There is currently a Facebook broad category targeting option for mobile devices. Advertisers can choose between Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone. However – this targeting simply means that a user has accessed Facebook through one of these devices. Creating an ad and selecting this targeting will show ads to these users – however they could be accessing Facebook via the web or even a different device. If Facebook were to tweak this and allow advertisers who select iPhone to have ads show specifically ON the iPhone to a user accessing Facebook from their iPhone – this would mark a significant opportunity. Specifically – one of the largest advertising categories on mobile devices is for apps – and the massive gaming subcategory. If Facebook were to enable actual mobile device-specific targeting – iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry application developers could then leverage Facebook advertising to drive application installs – taking the user right from the click of the ad into the corresponding app store. It seems that right now Facebook wants to limit mobile ads to be sponsored stories in the news feed for many reasons – to maintain user experience, to keep users within Facebook, and an effort to make it not feel like advertising. Given this – it is unlikely that Facebook would allow ads from the mobile news feed to direct users anywhere outside of Facebook. However – the opportunity is there – and the revenue potential is huge.

White Label App Platfor...

Appia , an app marketplace and white-label app platform, is broadening its support for Android with the introduction of Pay Per Install App Advertising for Google Play (formerly known as the Android Market). Up until now, all the downloads generated through PPD (pay per download) were done through an Appia-powered app store, but now developers can purchase a Pay Per Install campaign and drive traffic back to Google Play. This, in turn, can then boost their app’s install numbers and rank. The news comes at a time when Appia is hitting another notable milestone: its network has passed 500 million mobile consumers worldwide. To give you an idea of their growth, when we covered the launch of their PPD service in April 2011 , the company was reporting more than 200 million mobile subscribers. In addition to this 250% growth in terms of network reach, the company also claims to have driven more than 15 million sponsored app installs over the past 12 months, with an average of more than 25 million total app downloads per month, and more than 400 million app downloads since its debut. The new support for Google Play allows developers to now run both Pay Per Download and Pay Per Install campaigns. Plus, it offers advanced reporting which will show campaign activity by platform, device, and geography (country). This allows the developers to really see where their campaign is working and where it isn’t. To generate this data, developers can install tracking via an in-app API or through server to server integration. A big difference between Appia and its competition (think TapJoy, and other incentivized Pay per Performance networks) is that the traffic Appia sends is non-incentivized. That means users aren’t offered virtual currency or other rewards in exchange for their actions. In addition, the company allows developers to buy on-deck ad placement on the app portals from over 50 major operators globally, including Vodafone, Vodacom, Telcel, America Movil, Claro, Comcel, Myxer and Zedge. Given its reach, Appia attracts big-name advertisers. Over the past 12 months, the company has seen advertisers like Facebook, AT&T, Priceline, Gameview Studios, Amazon, MocoSpace, CrowdStar, Blue Lion, Tequila Mobile, Storm8, Pocket Gems, Per Blue, Big Fish Games and others using its platform to bring in new mobile users.

Market Research Startup...

EyeTrackShop , a startup that develops eye-tracking technology for measuring ad effectiveness, has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Northzone . The company says its technology works through a regular webcam, allowing market researchers to gather data quickly and affordably. You can run the test before you spend money on a campaign, or test how well the advertising works once it’s live, and how it performed in different formats and sites. Customers include big tech companies such as Google, AOL, and Microsoft, as well as P&G and JCDeacaux. One of the other features touted on the EyeTrackShop site is the ability to test advertising in multiple countries simultaneously. The company says it will use the new money on international expansion, and on product development, too. EyeTrackShop spun out of eye-tracking company Tobii Technologies in 2010. A Y Combinator-backed startup called GazeHawk was trying to accomplish something similar, but its team was acquired by Facebook in March, and it looks like the GazeHawk product (which was not acquired) remains in limbo.

Report: Thompson Out, M...

We’re still confirming the news with Yahoo but AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher is reporting that as of tomorrow, Scott Thompson will be leaving his role as CEO of Yahoo, and getting replaced, on an interim basis, by Ross Levinsohn, currently the global media head. Thompson’s position has been mired in controversy since news broke the other week that he had lied about his qualifications — and that situation seemed to be going from bad to worse as the company failed to act on the news in any significant way — and Thompson remained in control. Some may even find the method in which he is finally going unsatisfactory: the company will apparently cite “personal reasons” for his departure, according to AllThingsD. Levinsohn, currently still the global media head overseeing advertising across all of Yahoo, had previously been the head of Yahoo’s Americas unit, a position he had held from November 2010. On paper, he is much closer to Yahoo’s core business operations than Thompson ever was: in addition to the advertising experience, his background includes three years as MD of Fuse Capital, a media/tech investment firm; and before that he put in time at News Corp as the head of Fox Interactive Media — the company’s big push into digital that included MySpace, their mobile business and other digital efforts. What Thompson lacks in that kind of media experience, he had in offering skills and background that could have potentially set Yahoo on a different strategic course — for example doing more in the area of commerce, something he helped grow significantly at PayPal. Swisher’s report also mentions that Daniel Loeb, the activist shareholder from Third Point who has been clamoring for board changes at the company, is also set for some potential vindication: she writes that he is set to get three board seats, including media executive Michael Wolf and “turnaround specialist” Harry Wilson — who are set to join as five current Yahoo directors step down with immediate effect. New director Fred Amoroso, who has been investigating issues raised by Loeb, will be named chairman of the board, she writes. Note: none of this has yet been confirmed with Yahoo directly yet. More to come.

Image Monetization Star...

Stipple , the advertising startup that helps Web publishers monetize their images, just announced that it has raised $5 million in a Series A round of funding. The company already raised a $2 million seed round from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mike Maples’ Floodgate, Justin Timberlake, and others. Floodgate and Relevance Capital led the new round, and there’s a long list of other investors: Kleiner Perkins Justin Timberlake Matt Mullenweg Naval Ravikant Quest Ventures Chris Harding Chris Ackerley John Keister Thomvest Parkview Stipple allows publishers to label and share people, places, and things in their images. Those images can in turn be used for monetization through commerce or advertising — for example, if you label a piece of clothing in a picture, Stipple can allow the reader to buy that clothing. Companies like Luminate and ThingLink are trying to do something similar, but CEO Rey Flemings says that with millions of tagged images, Stipple has the the largest “corpus” on the Web, and it’s adding 1 million new images per month. He also says there 4,000 active publishers in the Stipple network, adding up to more than 3 billion monthly pageviews. Flemings says the money will be used for the usual things — growing the team and improving product, with a focus on mobile commerce. The next version of Stipple is scheduled to open to the public in mid-June.