It’s a bit of an estimate, but according to a recent post at Venturebeat, Friendster made $700,000 in revenue in December on 6 billion page views. This equates to making $0.12 per 1000 page views. I checked and they look to average about three ads per page, meaning they’re really making $0.04 per 1000 ad impressions, giving them an effective CPM of $0.04.
Is this good? I’m sure that low of a number shocks some people, probably bloggers and other niche publishers who get really high CPM numbers from targeted advertising, Google Adsense, or Yahoo Publisher Network.
Social networks are a different animal though, as contextual advertising doesn’t work as well when there isn’t a strong context to grab from a page. In the cases of most social networks, display banner-style advertising generates higher rates. But is $0.04 good?
I know the data of some other social networks, and I can say that this isn’t THAT shocking, but I definitely think there is room for improvement. I have some ideas on how I’d improve Friendster’s advertising revenue, but first I’d like to see if any of you out there have any suggestions. Speak up!
I seriously question the 6 billion pageviews figure in this story. They are not that large.
From an advertising standpoint, $0.04 per 1000 ad impressions sounds like a great deal. Is Friendster the next best place to advertise on or does anyone else have a better recommendation?
It depends on what audience you’re looking for with your advertising. The reason the Friendster and other social networking audiences are so cheap is because they don’t drive clicks and conversions as much as many other audiences.
I don’t know if 6 bil is a bad figure for their pageviews. I am running a brand new site that has only minimal functionality compared to FaceBook and a very small user base at this point in our beta, and we had over 1 Mil page impressions last month.
I have to say that the .04 sounds low as my historical adsense numbers are significantly higher than that, although if I had 6 bil page impressions, I think I’d take the .04!
For Indonesia (Friendster’s largest segment), 0.04 cpm is good.