Facebook Ads Growing – Who Is Losing Ad Revenue?

Last week Ad Age posted an article by Edmund Lee “Facebook Scores Again With Most Ads on the Web“, a well-written piece about how Facebook serves the most people in social networking but also serves the most ads too.

Supported by charts and graphs Lee illustrates how in late 2010 an increase in Facebook ads per page to 1.7 from 1 per page increased ad revenue to $1.86 billion last year. Projections place that revenue at $2.19 billion in 2011.

One chart noticeably missing is where did those $1.86 billion in advertising dollars come from? In today’s economy its certain those are not all plus dollars. Is it all from print? Or, more specifically, newspapers? Is it from radio or TV?

My post “Mary Meeker’s Crystal Ball On Tech”, introduced you to her perspective on the upsides of internet marketing and advertising. It appears her prediction that the discrepancy between consumers time spent with different media and the ad dollars spent on those media would tip towards online advertising. The biggest loser? Newspapers.

Oddly enough some may be coming from Microsoft sites and AOL – both having lost in the number of ads per page metric. While not as significant as the newspaper’s drain – Microsoft and AOL need to respond to this trend or face the consequences of being irrelevant for advertisers online.