April 13, 2006 | In Technology |
In the past couple of years, the increasing popularity of online social networking sites (i.e. MySpace.com) has presented a unique set of targeting conditions for advertisers.
By providing demographic information about its subscribers, a social networking company can ensure that its sponsors ad dollars are spent in the most productive possible way. This boosts targeting and thus potential conversion rates to much higher levels than television, radio, or run-of-network online advertising.
This fact, combined with the generally rising cost of online advertising is greatly boosting the incentive for social networking communities to load their services with demographically targeted advertising.
In itself, there’s nothing wrong with using these demographics in marketing, so long as identifiable user information is kept secure, and never given out to the advertisers themselves. The quantity of ads, however, will likely upset some users if the community websites get too greedy.
The companies should do their best to effectively utilize a small amount of ad space, they shouldn’t let commercial content dominate the services. In the long term, conservative placement of highly targeted ads is a much more effective strategy to capture the minds of users.
