Facebook would prefer if users never left the data-mining confines of its website, but when they do, the social networking giant is determined to still make some serious cash at the exit door.
The company’s new log-out page ads are selling for $710,000 for a day’s run in the U.S. market,according to Ad Age Digital. Citing an unnamed source “briefed on the product,” the industry publication reported Friday that Facebook is actually bundling ads that show up on users’ news feeds together with the log-out page placement as a package for advertisers, rather than selling the log-out spot as a stand-alone product.
Facebook introduced log-out ads last month at its fMC conference for marketers. The ads represent “the closest thing to a traditional banner ad the social network has ever produced,” Ad Age Digital notes. Up until now, Facebook has mainly sold small, sidebar-situated display ads that it calls “stories” and which advertisers can choose to show to specific demographics they’d like to target.
Advertisers don’t have nearly the audience-tweaking tools at their disposal with the log-out ads, according to Ad Age Digital—they can only be targeted by age and gender. Instead, the log-out product is “a shotgun for those looking for the most reach and frequency as quickly as possible.”
The trouble is, it’s not entirely clear how valuable the real estate is for advertisers. Facebook said last month that 37 million U.S. users log out of the site daily, according to Ad Age Digital. That’s a comparable figure to the 40 million daily unique visitors Yahoo gets per month to its home page, where a daily banner ad is reportedly in the same ballpark price range as Facebook’s log-out ad asking price.
Just south of 40 million sets of eyeballs in single day has got to be lot more attractive than an actual 40 million spread out over a month, right? But does anyone really think an audience trying to get away from a site is nearly as receptive to ads as an audience entering one?
Of course, Facebook does have the single biggest dedicated user base on the Internet at 750 million and counting, though just a subset of those users log out of the site on a daily basis, Ad Age Digital points out. And some companies have jumped at the new advertising opportunity, including Microsoft, which recently ran a log-out ad for Bing, and Subway, whose ad on Facebook’s exit page is pictured above.
And consider this—Facebook’s log-out ad price may seem steep, but you can still get five days’ worth of them for about what cost on average to run a 30-second spot in this year’s Super Bowl.
[pcworld]
