Report: Project Beacon, Facebook's Outside Ad Strategy
TechCrunch has uncovered part of what Facebook will be announcing next week at ad:tech in New York. "Project Beacon" is an internal project that will allow Facebook to gather buying information about its users on third party ecommerce sites, in exchange for free advertising in the news feed from those third parties.
The way it works, according to a leaked document obtained by TechCrunch, is that participating partner sites would give buyers the option of sending purchase information to their Facebook news feed (i.e., "Username bought a product at Partner Site"). Third party sites don't receive any monetary compensation for participation in Beacon, but in return they get free advertising in the Facebook news feed. On their end, Facebook gets highly valuable user data, which they can use to better target ads, and they get increased brand awareness (on those retailer web sites).
Image from TechCrunch.
As with most things involving the news feed, Facebook users will have finely tuned controls over which participating ecommerce sites can send purchase information to their news feed, and can choose to send all data, send no data, or ask after every purchase on a site by site bases (or, users will reportedly be able to make those settings global).
Beacon, at least as it exists in the leaked document that TechCrunch reported on, is a good idea. If Facebook can get just a handful of major retailers that have a lot of reach on the Internet to participate, they'll be able to get a large amount of very valuable data on their users. Imagine buying a playpen on Amazon and then getting ads for baby toys on Facebook -- that's very powerful stuff. Further, I think if the privacy controls are done well, people won't look at this as an invasion of privacy because shopping is already such a social activity for so many people (just take a trip to your local mall to see what I mean). As long as you can easily leave embarrassing purchases off the news feed (or purchases that are made as presents for friends who might read said news feed), this should fly with users.
What do you think about Facebook's planned tie-in with third party ecommerce sites? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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More like "Project Bacn"...
I like the shopping comparison - Zuckerberg has said FB's goal is to mirror offline relationships, so that makes a lot of sense. I think people have yet to take full advantage of the power of social networks, and it seems FB continues to explore new possibilities.
Where is the biggest semi-social (?) net eBay in all of these?
Can you guys provide some info on the diff in opinion between mozilla and microsoft on next revision of javascript?
WoW! Facebook is definitely the next billion dollars company huh? I wonder what are their next strategy to make it a big hit?
Big Brother just got more real.
Unlike the way that Google collects information about you, this is very in-your-face. Finally you cannot not-realize that Facebook is collecting data about everything they do when you buy something at Amazon and all of a sudden FB is asking you if you want that to appear in your feed. I guess some people would be lulled by the the ability to tell FB you don't want that information to be public in your feed, and probably won't realize that FB still gets to keep that info anyway.
What's most interesting to me is to see what the public reaction is going to be. If it's not enough to create a privacy outcry (and I expect it won't be), then I guess that people really don't care about their privacy so much anymore...
That "This isn't me" option looks ominous. Want to ruin somebody's rep? Buy something embarrassing or incriminating as the victim and have it displayed on his/her FB profile.
Seriously though, will FB also get data if an item is returned? That would seem like a good time to display a targeted ad on an alternative product. An option to rate the item on FB after the purchase (see Netflix) would also be good additional data.
Facebook is doing the right thing. just earn money by AD is not a good idea. ecommerce is the right thing. beacon is the good start to enter ecommerce market