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Today Facebook is to announce SocialAds. Adweek Magazine says the following:

Full details of Facebook’s SocialAds are not yet known. The company declined to comment in advance of the meeting. According to sources, however, the aim of SocialAds is to find ways to embed advertising more naturally into the site and develop an ad network for showing placements on other sites. (As part of the deal it inked with Microsoft that included a $240 million investment, Microsoft sells the display ads on the site.) Facebook is expected to use the data available in user’s profiles to more carefully tailor offers served through its News Feed tracking feature. Those ads have already performed well, with some gaining click-through rates over 10 percent.

With Microsoft’s recent investment in Facebook, I’m predicting that SocialAds will be a competitor to AdSense. Facebook will launch an advertising network allowing publishers to embed Facebook SocialAds tags. These would deliver ads for advertisers which have the potential to be targeted based on cookies set by Facebook’s own ad servers and which will contain data allowing advertisers to target based on a combination of behavior and Facebook user profile information, or information from Facebook’s social network.

I really hope that’s what it turns out to be. If it works, advertisers will win and so will publishers. Google AdSense on the other hand… that remains to be seen.

UPDATE: So it turns out I was wrong with my prediction. At first glance I’m pretty underwhelmed by FB’s announcements. Adding to a person’s Facebook newsfeed from creative is interesting, but not that much; and I worry about the increasing irrelevancy of the FB newsfeed, especially as it becomes populated with more and more stuff.

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