Is FACEBOOK the answer to effective advertising on YouTube?…..Part 6
Enter Facebook.com. I’m going to assume that you have a basic knowledge of what Facebook is, but I will go into a little bit of detail as to what Facebook means to companies like Microsoft and Google from the standpoint of aggregating information about its users.
The “low down” on Facebook users as per: http://www.facebookmarketingforprofessionals.com/practice_areas/facebook-usage-statistics.cfm
- More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
- More than two-thirds of Facebook users are not college students
- The fastest growing demographic of Facebook users is those who are 35 years old and older
- The average user has 120 Friends on the site
- More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared via Facebook each week
- There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
These numbers and statistics are rather staggering in some cases but what is even more important to keep in mind is that the average user puts information on Facebook about themselves that even their mother doesn’t know. It is safe to say that they have probably never put this information voluntarily anywhere else on the web before. In the FaceBook forums people discuss relationships, friends and family, things they love to do and even more importantly what they are doing at that moment. This is not to say that the information is totally accurate. The things placed on Facebook by the users about themselves could by definition be considered propaganda in its truest sense.
(This was pointed out to me by a podcast done by the StuffYouShouldKnow team http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/category/stuff-you-should-know/ )
The user has total control and puts on Facebook only information about themselves they want and choose to share with others. Taking the propaganda factor into account, there is most likely more information about that person on Facebook than on any other site or aggregator of “user specific information” on the web to date.
Facebook represents the ideal, indexed and categorized repository of user specific information that Google could use to match-up content with advertising for the users of YouTube. Allowing it to show ads that the logged in users would be interested in and thereby increasing the revenue those ads generate by untold percentages. Maybe even allowing them to make a profit with YouTube.com.
And there you have it, all that just to say Facebook has got the stuff Google needs to make YouTube profitable. I guess the big question is how much would Facebook.com cost Google and if you divide that by the number of days in a 4 year period is it worth it?
Can Google afford to wait to leave a door open for a competitor such as Microsoft and the new yet unproven search engine Bing.com?
I don’t think so.
