The State of Facebook Advertising in 2007
Facebook Ads launched in November 2007 alongside Social Ads, Pages and the controversial Beacon tool. Here's what was available and why caution made sense.
Facebook advertising as an actual product barely existed for most of 2007. For the first ten months of the year, Facebook’s relationship with advertisers ran through a banner-ad partnership with Microsoft, struck the previous year, with none of the social targeting the platform would later become known for. That changed on November 6th, when Facebook unveiled a real ad platform at an event in New York, and it’s worth being precise about what that launch included, because a piece on Facebook advertising’s “state” this year is a piece about a launch late in the year, not an established channel with a track record.
What Facebook announced
The November announcement bundled together three distinct pieces. Facebook Pages gave businesses and brands a free presence on the site, similar in spirit to a profile but built for organizations rather than individuals. Social Ads let advertisers buy display placements that could incorporate a user’s own social actions, showing an ad alongside a note that a friend had become a fan of a Page or engaged with a brand. And Beacon, the most ambitious and immediately controversial piece, was a tracking tool that reported a user’s purchases and activities on partner sites, including retailers like Overstock.com and Blockbuster, back to Facebook so they could be shared with that user’s friends, by default and without a clear opt-in.
Why caution is the right posture heading into this
Beacon drew sharp criticism almost immediately, both from privacy advocates and from users who discovered purchases they hadn’t intended to broadcast showing up in their friends’ news feeds. That reaction is a genuine signal worth taking seriously: a platform’s first attempt at monetizing social data got the privacy line wrong badly enough to generate public complaints within days of launch. Any business considering Facebook advertising should treat that as a preview of how closely users will scrutinize what gets shared on their behalf, not as an isolated misstep to shrug off.
The context that makes the platform interesting anyway
None of this means the underlying opportunity isn’t real. Facebook crossed 50 million active users earlier this fall, a scale few social platforms had reached, and in October Microsoft invested 240 million dollars for a 1.6 percent stake, valuing the company at roughly 15 billion dollars and extending the existing arrangement giving Microsoft rights to sell Facebook’s banner ads outside the new social ad format. That’s a meaningful vote of confidence from a company that had already been Facebook’s ad sales partner since 2006, well before this fall’s Social Ads launch.
What this means for a business deciding whether to test it
Facebook advertising in its current form is not a channel with years of benchmark data, mature self-serve tools or a settled set of best practices, the kind of maturity pay-per-click search advertising had built up over the better part of a decade. It is a brand-new, fast-growing platform experimenting in public, including experimenting with how much user data it’s comfortable surfacing. For a business willing to test small and watch closely, particularly around anything resembling Beacon-style activity sharing, there’s a genuine early-mover opportunity in reaching a large, engaged, demographically distinct audience. For a business that needs predictability and a track record before committing budget, it’s reasonable to watch this space for a few more months before jumping in.
Keep exploring: browse more Paid Advertising guides, see everything we published in 2007 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
