I've done quite a bit of marketing on Facebook and while the cost per click (CPC) has sometimes been pretty good (i.e. affordable) I've also found the cost to be quite high, sometimes approaching the price of Google depending on the market.

I've only ever run traffic to landing pages outside of Facebook and I believe this to be one of the reasons the CPC has been higher.

Here's an interesting graphic from FlowTown showing some Facebook stats for your viewing pleasure. Just click on the image to see the full view…

Go here to find out more about FlowTown

http://www.flowtown.com/blog/

Back in May comScore reported that Facebook served about 346,000,000,000 ads in the first quarter of 2011.

Facebook is so large that it now accounts for about one out of every three ad impressions in the U.S., according to the latest statistics from comScore Ad Metrix. In the first quarter of 2011, comScore estimates that 1.1 trillion ads were served to U.S. Internet users, and 346 billion of those (or 31 percent) were on Facebook. This percentage is up from 23 percent in the third quarter of last year.

Recently another report estimating earnings has been put forth;

Facebook now accounts for one out of three ad impressions in the U.S., and that, really, no other web property in the U.S. comes close (Yahoo was second with 10 percent). That means that Facebook served approximately 340 billion ads in the first quarter. It’s probably not a surprise, then, that advertising makes up for about 89 percent of the social network’s total revenues, which are estimated at about $1.6 billion for the first six months of 2011.

So based on those numbers, which I find hard to comprehend, Facebook revenue in 1 quarter was roughly $800,000,000 (half of 1.6 billion). And 800 million dollars divided 346 billion impressions is 0.0023 cents per impression or $2.30 per thousand impressions or CPM?

You don't have to buy advertising on Facebook by CPM, in fact, most savvy advertisers start off paying per click and then move to CPM when their ads are performing well.

I know you can theoretically get 1 cent click on Facebook, but in recent experiences with their advertising platform I have seen click prices soar to Google levels!

Not unusual to start with a bid estimate of 3,4 even 5 bucks a click.

Sure those prices will come down if you get a reasonable click through rate (CTR), but even then you'll still be paying 60, 70 cents a click, which as far as I'm aware is now good

Are we going to see ad revenues surge into the trillions in the second half of 2011? Is my math off? Have I gone insane?

Here's a lady with a very nice voice explaining some basic about the Facebook advertising platform…

How Advertising Works on Facebook

Ever wonder why you see certain ads on Facebook? This video explains how our ad system works to show you relevant ads without sharing any of your personal information with advertisers.

==> Original article on techcrunch

==> Latest article on the crunchy thing

I read somewhere recently that Facebook has got over 750 Million, that's 750,000,000 members and growing fast (as every business owner jumps on the bandwagon for cheap traffic and instant buyer riches…).

An article on the Huffington Post recently about Facebooks automated system for dealing with (or trying to at least) deal with spam was very interesting. Not because it automatically dealt with what it thought was spam, incorrectly in this instance. No we've had automatic spam removal for years with email filters etc.

What's caught my attention was;

"Our systems classify over 10 billion actions (suspicious logins, friend requests, etc.) and pieces of content (messages, Wall posts, etc.) every day," Noyes said. "Of course, no system is perfect, and we do sometimes make mistakes."

Ten billion actions a day! That's 10,000,000,000! We're talking bailout numbers here!

Seriously though, have you noticed how a lot of websites these days never seem to Read the rest of this entry »

Well I have to admit I find it hard to believe that people search for Facebook and related terms but there you go.

Here's an article that describes the details;

New York, N.Y., Dec. 29, 2010 - Experian® Hitwise®, a part of Experian Marketing Services, has analyzed the top 1000 search terms for 20101 and Facebook was the top-searched term overall. This is the second year that the social networking website has been the top search term overall, accounting for 2.11 percent of all searches.1 Four variations of the term "facebook" were among the top 10 terms and accounted for 3.48 percent of searches overall.

Oh and Facebook was the most visited website; doesn;t say it was the stickiest too but I'm sure it was…

Get the full skinny here.

No doubt this will be an ongoing issue for years but with the popularity of Facebook and the number of developers creating applications it's going to be hard to police and control!

The Wall Street Journal said applications were providing access to Facebook members' names and, in some cases, their friends' names, to companies that build detailed databases on people in order to track them online.

All of the 10 most popular applications on Facebook were transmitting unique user ID numbers to outside companies, it said. They include Zynga's FarmVille, with 59 million users, Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille.

==> Read the full report here.