Advertisements are a major source of revenue for Facebook. There are a wide variety of options that potential advertisers can choose from, Page owners can pay Facebook to increase the visibility of their posts, while advertisers can even run ads on the world’s largest social network to direct traffic to external websites. Its ad platform is working very well inside the social network, but what if it was let loose on the outside? That’s exactly what is Facebook is testing at a small scale right now. The company is using its own ad serving platform, as opposed to an outside platform, to deliver ads to third-party mobile applications.
Facebook says that this test is limited to a few partners and advertisers, and that its not looking for additional participants at this point in time. The company says that this test is more like a “mobile ad network,” which is being put through its paces in a small scale test, extending Facebook’s targeting mechanisms to increase reach for Facebook advertisers, help developers make more money from their apps and also increase the relevancy of ads that end users see in said mobile apps. Facebook hasn’t named its partners, and has also not revealed exactly what sort of data it is going to use for targeting advertisements. There might be some outcry by privacy advocates on this, but we’ll have to wait and see if Facebook’s mobile ad network ambitions ever turn into a full-fledged revenue stream for the company.