Ad-Providers on Facebook Platform

 In order to better serve your monetization needs while developing your application, below is a list of companies that provide advertising services on Facebook Platform. Advertising Providers displayed on this list have all signed the Platform Terms for Advertising Providers and are bound by all Facebook policies. Developers must only use services from companies that appear on this list. Any other provider is prohibited until they agree to the terms above. These providers are not approved by nor affiliated with Facebook and, therefore, it is your responsibility as the developer to ensure compliance with Facebook's Advertising Guidelines even though the companies on this list have agreed to the policies as well. We hope that by providing this list of companies that have acknowledged their commitment to advertising quality that we can all foster a better user experience.

Ad4Game

AdJug

Adknowledge - (Cubics and Super Rewards)
ADTELLIGENCE
Applifier
APP Prizes
appssavvy
Bizmey
Casale Media
CPX Interactive
DoubleDing
Fox Networks
Httpool
Lifestreet Media
MATOMY
Mediastay
One iota
Paymentwall
Peanut Labs
PubMatic
RadiumOne
RockYou
Rubicon Project
Smowtion
Sometrics
SponsorPay
SupersonicAds
SVnetwork
Tapjoy
tmpSocial
TokenAds
TrialPay
Underdog Media
WildTangent
XTEND

Facebook © 2011

Virtual goods have a bright future in the explosive social gaming segment. But does advertising? Not based on comments from several of the industry’s biggest players.
Advertising was hardly mentioned during the early sessions of the New York Games Conference today, as several analysts and industry leaders laid out their predictions for the gaming industry over the next few years. When the subject of monetization came up, virtual goods and other forms of microtransactions were mentioned as the primary business model for social games -- at least in the near term. Yet, there was little doubt among experts that social gaming -- already a mass medium unto itself -- would continue to grow exponentially.

According to Atul Bagga, director and senior analyst at ThinkEquity, a whopping 55 percent of Facebook users play games. In addition, a stunning 40 percent of page views on that social network are game related. “We are only just scratching the surface,” said Bagga. Among his predictions were that Facebook would soon start seeing more immersive, hardcore-type games that appeal to niche audiences, as opposed to Zynga’s massively popular Farmville, which is played by 65 million people each month.

Another key trend: Social aspects of gaming are spreading beyond Facebook to multiplayer titles like World of Warcraft and console games, as more players connect their PlayStations, Xboxes and Wii’s to the Internet. Currently, the business model for most Web-based social games is a play-for-free system that encourages users to purchase virtual goods that enhance play -- or to charge for access to premium content. But for games that users pay for in advance (like console games), or subscription-based titles such as Warcraft, the current monetization models are being challenged as gamers play these games for increasingly longer durations, said Bagga. “Users play the same game over and over again,” said Bagga. “You have people playing World of Warcraft for 150 hours....vendors need to monetize that [time]. A lot of people are leaving money on the table.” Perhaps tellingly, however, Bagga did not suggest advertising as a potential means of monetizing such prolonged play. Nor did Steven Chiang, studios president at Zynga, during a keynote interview today. Chiang repeatedly emphasized the play-for-free/microtranscations model, adding that the majority of Farmville users do not pay to participate in the game. Chiang said that Zynga was developing a slew of new titles, but he downplayed the idea that the firm would create immersive, console-like titles. “We are looking for ideas that people can understand in about five seconds,” he said. When asked about the company’s relationship with Facebook -- which has recently toned down the number of notifications users receive about their friends activities in Farmville, Mob Wars and the like -- Chiang looked to dodge any controversy. “They want to create the best user experience for their customers,” he said. “We are all about the user experience.”

The New York Times is offering a platform that other publishers can use to produce their own apps for devices starting with the iPad and iPhone.

The first publishers to sign up to use the platform, which The Times is calling Press Engine, are the Telegraph Media Group and three A.H. Belo newspapers: Dallas Morning News, Providence Journal and Press-Enterprise in Southern California. The publishers keep any advertising and circulation revenue the apps bring in; they pay the Times a one-time license fee for the platform and then a monthly maintenance fee.

New revenue
The platform is the latest bid by a media company to derive revenue from sources beyond the traditional core streams of ad sales and circulation. Most often the recent attempts along those lines have involved providing agency-like services -- whether built up internally or acquired, as Meredith and Hearst have done -- but this platform is a new way for a media company to provide services to other media companies. And it's a new way for a media company to make money from the booming app economy beyond making its own apps. The Times decided to offer the product after inquiries started coming from other publishers, said Christine Topalian, a director of the News Services division at the Times. "Over the last year there's been a particular amount of interest from different clients asking whether we would be willing to license the code of our own New York Times application," Ms. Topalian said. The Times is not exactly replicating its apps for others, however, Ms. Topalian said. "We're taking, for lack of a better word, the DNA of them and the functionality of them."

Decisions about paid content
The Dallas Morning News was one of the papers that sought out the Times to see if it could help with an iPad app, said James Moroney, CEO and publisher at the Dallas Morning News. "When a company like ours, that doesn't have the resources and scale of The New York Times, went looking for a partner, the first place we looked was to The New York Times because of their track record and because they are in the same business we are in." The Dallas Morning News plans to introduce its iPad app, built using the Press Engine platform, near the beginning of next year, Mr. Moroney said. First it has to decide how to reconcile charging for the iPad app, as it plans to do, with posting all its content free on the web, as it currently does. Consumers aren't likely to pay for an iPad app to access the same content they can get free on the iPad's web browser. "We are looking at how and what we might do about taking some of our content and making it available only to people who have either paid for a print subscription or who are paying for some kind of digital access," Mr. Moroney said.

Dennis Crowley, co-founder of hot location-based social service Foursquare, addressed a roomful of marketers in June. He asked for a show of hands of how many had tried to work with the company but didn't hear back. A lot of hands went up. The simple message: the still-small company is struggling to further develop its service while responding to the avalanche of requests. Now, with $20 million in new funding, agencies are hopeful the digital world's new belle of the ball will build tools to help them use the service in deeper ways. Adweek spoke with several agencies that report frustrating experiences with Foursquare. Some have found it both hard to contact and unwilling to come up with marketing ideas. One agency representing a major package-goods client said the company put the onus on the brand and agency to find the best way to use the service.
"They're not responsive and extremely hard to work with," said a digital agency exec who asked not to be named. "It's hard to bring campaigns to life. Nobody knows how to create a badge or ask [Foursquare how] to enable behavior. It's black magic." In general, he said, "it's pretty much unworkable."  One sticking point is Foursquare's strategy of initially limiting advertiser participation. Pepsi, for instance, has an exclusive lock on the soft drinks category. Additionally, Foursquare has identified one "charter advertiser" for some major categories, which it then works with to better understand what works before taking on other advertisers. While less formal than exclusive contracts, it nonetheless leaves some competitors out in the cold, if only temporarily.

"There have been a number of things we've been told we can't do because it's already being done in some markets," said Adrian Ho, a partner with Zeus Jones. Working with Foursquare, he noted, is in some ways similar to working with Facebook in its early days.  Foursquare doesn't "have the infrastructure that makes clients comfortable," Ho added. "It's a bit like the Wild West. It's hard to get meetings in person. It's hard to get time on the phone." There is the danger the hiccups will sour relationships. Mark Drapeau, Microsoft's director of innovative social engagement, left a scorching comment on a blog post about Foursquare. He said he tried everything from e-mailing to calling to stopping by Foursquare's office in the hopes of doing a partnership for a Microsoft event that would include a custom badge. He said he eventually gave up.  "They're creating a new marketing opportunity," said Andrea Harrison, social media lead at Razorfish, which has yet to work with Foursquare on a program. "They don't have the packaged media kit ready to go." Many startups, of course, experience growing pains. The company's smaller competitors, for instance, are also still figuring out how to work with businesses. Gowalla, for one, does not yet have self-service tools for businesses. Josh Williams, CEO of Gowalla, said it's working to develop them. "There's a lot of hype in the space," he said. "There's promise of great things that will happen, but right now it's really fledgling."

- Brian Morrissey

If you’re a bargain hound, here’s a great Twitter account for you to follow: @EarlyBird, the latest official Twitter account from the company itselfIt will tweet out time-sensitive and/or limited-quantity deals from various companies and brands — giving special advantage to the retail-obsessed who are also social-media savvy. How does the EarlyBird work? Twitter () will partner with select advertisers to help them promote relevant, timely offers for Twitter users. The offers will vary in availability, price, product and other terms. Twitter will make money based on these partnerships, and users who follow the account will benefit by getting “first dibs” on limited-time and limited-quantity specials.

EarlyBird — which was first spotted by ReadWriteWeb on Friday — marks yet another evolution in Twitter’s business model, with Promoted Tweets coming to life this spring to expose users of the site to relevant content from advertisers. Many businesses have included Twitter in their social media marketing strategies. “We believe that surfacing deals through the @earlybird account will help you discover the best of those deals,” reads Twitter’s statement on the new account. We’re pinging Twitter for more details, such as the kinds of deals to expect and how often to expect them. Stay tuned for updates! And in the meantime, let us know what you think: Is @EarlyBird a good idea for Twitter users who love a good deal, or is it the online equivalent of a mailbox stuffed with coupons and junk mail?

Thanks to the massive popularity of Facebook and the addictive appeal of real-time simulation games, gaming on social networks has gained widespread adoption.

According to a BlogHer/iVillage study, about 22 percent of adult U.S. Internet users played casual games daily in March 2010. A study from ThinkEquity estimated that 79 million people will play social games in the U.S. in 2012, up from 47 million in 2009. As the social gaming audience continues to grow, so will revenue from direct and indirect payments and advertising, resulting in more than $720 million, according to ThinkEquity. By 2012, the market is expected to reach $2.18 billion.

U.S. direct-paying users are expected to generate $1.19 billion in revenue by 2012, up from $340 million in 2009. Indirect-paying users -- defined as those who opt-in to advertising offers attached to social games -- will inject $868 million into the industry in 2012, up from $324 million in 2009. Social game advertising revenue will double to $124 million in 2012. "Social gaming represents opportunity for marketers," said Paul Verna, a senior analyst at eMarketer. "In the coming months, expect to see more marketers muscling into the social gaming space through brand marketing tactics such as display ads, video ads, custom games, in-game enhancements, product placements and sponsorships."

 

Mobile search could grow from 9 percent of all queries this year to 20 percent by 2012, estimates RBC analyst Ross Sandler in a new report issued today. There is still a huge gap between mobile’s share of overall search queries and its share of search advertising. Sandler estimates that mobile will still represent less than 2 percent of search ad budgets this year, compared to the 9 percent overall share. But he thinks that gap can narrow and that mobile search advertising can be a $2 billion to $3 billion market in 2012. His assumptions seem a bit aggressive on the ad revenue side. There might always be a gap between mobile search share and mobile search ad spending because of the relative effectiveness of search ads on PCs versus on mobile phones. But Sandler does a deep dive into mobile search advertising and comes up with some compelling reasons why that gap should at the very least begin to narrow just as mobile search starts to take off thanks to the growth of large touchscreen devices such as the iPhone, iPad, Android, and Blackberry.

One big advantage the new generation of smartphones have over PCs in terms of search advertising is that the screen real estate devoted to search ads is much bigger. A single search ad on a PC takes up about 4 percent of the screen real estate, whereas a single search ad on a smartphone takes up about 20 percent of the screen. The relatively larger size of the ads results in higher click-through rates on mobile (as much as 3 to 5 times as much).  On the iPhone, one search ad takes up 22 percent of the screen, and if two search ads are served up it takes up nearly half (48 percent).  For Android, those numbers are 18 percent and 38 percent for one and two search ads, respectively.

Sandler tested the same keywords across different devices (an iPhone, Android Nexus One, Blackberry, and aPC), and found that the average, for both the iPhone and the Nexus One, was 1.1 paid search results per query, compared to 9.2 search ads per query on a PC.  Searches on Blackberries showed hardly any paid results.

Another key driver for mobile search revenues should be the growth of local ads.  Sandler found that the ratio of localized or geo-targeted ads to non-local ads is still low and expects that to grow as advertisers learn how to geo-target their search ads.  Geo-targeted ads should also perform better, leading to higher mobile search ad revenues.

So how many people actually conduct searches on their smartphones? According to comScore, half of all smartphone owners conduct at least one search per month, 20 percent search once a week, and 11 percent search almost daily (which is about the same as the percentage of people who search on feature phones every month).

This year, Sandler estimates there will be 374 million people with smartphones, increasing to 766 million in 2012.  Consequently, the number of smartphone searches will grow from 157 billion to 586 billion (up from 35 billion two years ago).  The comparable number of searches on PCs this year will be 1.3 trillion, growing to 1.6 trillion in 2012.  Any way you look at it, mobile searches will become a significant portion of total searches within two years.  But how much will those searches be worth?  That is still a guessing game at this point.

As we speculated last week, Twitter is, indeed, experimenting with trending topics as ad space. This is all part of Promoted Tweets, the company’s new ad platform aimed at increasing brands’ interaction with fans — and increasing Twitter’s revenues, too.

These promoted trends are rumored to sell for tens of thousands of dollars. When a user clicks on the trending ad, he is directed to a search results page with the advertiser’s promoted tweet listed at the top. In this case, the promoted trend is from Toy Story, the first customer for trend-related advertising. Some of the promoted tweets for this ad read, “‘To infinity and beyond’! Toy Story 3 hits theaters Friday, June 18. Did you get your tickets yet?” and “Exclusive clip for our Tweeps! DJ Pogo presents a remix of the original classic before Toy Story 3 is out on 6/18.” Both contain links as calls to action, of course.

Here’s what the ads look like in action:

Of course, Twitter COO Dick Costolo insists these promoted tweets aren’t ads. But after checking out these tweets and their content, including links, an ad by any other name still smells like an ad to us.

Many potential users willing to pay for content