The UK Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is to guestimate the advertising revenues of Facebook for its next online adspend figures.
The trade body and its research partner on the study, PricewaterhouseCoopers, are working with digital media agencies including Isobar and Group M to model the social network’s ad revenues so it can present as accurate a picture as possible of digital ad spend in the first half of 2010, due in October.
Facebook is known to account for a large portion of display spending in the UK (and elsewhere) but it is not currently one of the more than 300 media owners that supply its revenues to the IAB to compile the study.
The IAB is keen to beef up the amount of display spend represented in the figures since it is paid search that continues to account for both the bulk of total spend and growth in the sector. Display advertising is seen as the area ripest for new growth as long as advertisers can be persuaded to use it as something other than a direct-response mechanism.
Speaking at a recent Guardian digital event for client advertisers, IAB head of research Tim Elkington said it lamented the degree to which display was not given due credit for its role in delivering online sales higher up in users’ routes to purchase.
The role of display for traditional brand awareness and perception has long been a key issue for the IAB to tackle since the format has become commoditised thanks to comparison with more successful channels for direct, sales-focused advertising, primarily paid search.
A recent study by the IAB examined the campaigns of three airlines to discover that display ads do increase the likelihood of conversion through ‘last-click’ routes like paid and natural search.
Elkington said discussions with Facebook about contributing formally to the study were ongoing and positive and agreed that modelling its revenues might help persuade the company to participate.
He added there had been discussion with the media agencies helping in the task about whether Facebook ads actually constituted search advertising since they are targeted against keywords in users’ profiles. However, it is most likely they will be treated as display due to the format of the ads.
petros diveris on 
Tobit Michael on 
Michael Rurup Andersen on 
Abhinav on 
September 2nd, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Given that it is estimated that facebook will make $2 Billion in revenue in 2010 and the UK represents approximately 5% of its global audience we can very crudly estimate that they will make $100,000,000 in revenue in the UK, a lot of which will come from display.
September 6th, 2010 at 1:50 pm
Hi – yep. I think what the media agencies will be able to add is – as a proportion of their digital media spend on display – how much of that goes on Facebook – from where they can forecast total Facebook display spend. What it might miss is money on things like brand pages etc. that you could argue the major media agencies (as against social specialists, for example) have a disproportionately low commitment to. Be nice to know the process though.