Facebook’s new keyword ad system

Facebook has quietly launched a keyword advertising system to rival Google’s AdSense. Disguised as a simple upgrade to Flyers, its system for selling cheap ads on a self-service basis, the new system charges per click and lets advertisers target by city, gender, age, relationship status, employer, educational level, political views, and keywords. Facebook has the data, generated by its users and the new system will have “detailed reporting”.

Facebook still running ads on racist groups

Adverts continue to appear beside far-right and racist groups on Facebook despite major advertisers pulling their campaigns following revelations that their brands were appearing alongside such groups. First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, Halifax, AA, and Prudential have already pulled their ads after finding they were appearing next to the far-right BNP party, following a story broken by New Media Age this week. But research by tbites has found that adverts

Facebook still running ads on racist groups

Adverts continue to appear beside far-right and racist groups on Facebook despite major advertisers pulling their campaigns following revelations that their brands were appearing alongside such groups. First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, Halifax, AA, and Prudential have already pulled their ads after finding they were appearing next to the far-right BNP party, following a story broken by New Media Age this week. But research by tbites has found that adverts

Video of Bebo London office

The WSJ's Kara Swisher visits Bebo London. Why is it so small an office for such a high-profile startup? Its development team is in San Francisco, while much of the commercial deals take place in London, since Bebo is growing fastest in the UK and Europe. Featuring an interview with Joanna Shields, “President of International”, a former Silicon Valley executive with extensive European experience at companies like RealNetworks and Google.

Plaxo plans social network

Plaxo plans to release a social network “aggregator” on Monday. Its key features look likely to be an independence from platforms like Facebook, the ability to add information about the social networks your contacts use, feed aggregation and control over your owen data. Plaxo hopes its independence from closed networks like Facebook will give it a competitive edge, although all the evidence is to the contrary right now. While many

Facebook on track to overtake MySpace

A Comscore survey of global visitors age 15 and older highlights how Facebook has grown by 270% in the last year, which would put it on track to being larger than MySpace by the end of this year. In North America it has racked up 68.4% of the total unique visits to MySpace’s 62.1%. Facebook only opened its APIs on May 24th, 2007. Comscore said social networking behemoth MySpace.com attracted

Facebook doubles ad rates inside four months

Since February, Facebook has doubled its ad rates for sponsored groups from $150,000 to $300,000 in the US, reports ValleyWag which has obtained Facebook’s PowerPoint rate-card deck. Facebook now says it’s the top photo site. The minimum sponsorship remains $50,000, and Facebook claims the click-through rate is 20 times that of banners. This higher fee means the number of homepage links and sponsored stories advertisers get also doubles.

King of Shave preps Facebook app

King of Shaves, the shaving brand and e-commerce site, is planning to release a Facebook application in what could be the first ever brand marketing use of the social networking site in this manner. Word leaked out via Twitter and a screen shot has been posted to Flickr. So far brands in the UK (outside of media companies like Virgin and the BBC, see comment) have hung back form developing

Interview: Jaman prepares European assault

Jaman, California-based company that offers full length movies for either downloads or rental via a P2P client is planning to launch a European arm. The move is prior to an expansion of its programme of buying up rights to “mid-tail” independent and niche films. Unlike Joost, which is really aimed at TV viewers, Jaman is going for audiences who want successful independent film (the kind of thing “Trainspotting” was once

Facebook is the new AOL

ValleyWag today runs an interesting insider piece from a startup developing Facebook applications. Until recently FB members could invite all their friends to an app. creating massive viral adoption. Hence why some apps like Top Friends by Slide ended up with millions of users. Now Facebook is limiting app invitations to just 10 per day. That mean anyone creating a new app and trying to go viral has a mountain