The guest post below is written by Ryan Hupfer at HubPages. A couple of weeks ago HubPages ads were blocked from MySpace’s new self serve ad platform, MyAds, as being competitive to MySpace. That problem was fixed, but we asked Ryan, who advertises on both MySpace and Facebook, to write a guest post comparing the two platforms.
His results are below. In a nutshell, he finds Facebook a much better experience. When it comes to the results, though, things are mixed. Ryan’s test showed a lower cost per click on MySpace than Facebook ($.27 v. $.44). But the Facebook clicks were more productive: a new user cost just $5.11 on Facebook, v. $8.03 on MySpace.
The results, though, can’t be taken too seriously, for a number of reasons. First, Ryan spent $3,119 on Facebook ads and only $225 on MySpace (he says MySpace ads are much harder to administer, so he spent less). But that difference alone makes the results unreliable. Second, Facebook has text ads, MySpace has display ads, so the results are not apples-to-apples.
That gets me to the biggest reason the test isn’t scientific – both MySpace and Facebook knew about it. Ryan interviewed both extensively for the post. Since both knew this was coming, they both had incentives to help his ads get better performance.
But the post is valuable in that it shows what a real world advertiser thinks of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the platforms. Based on this, we may commission a true third party test of each of them, without notice to either company. Those results will be more relevant.
Update: A statement from MySpace on the post below:
We welcome the constructive feedback we’re getting on MyAds from our more than 15,000 advertisers—we’ve only been live publicly for a handful of weeks and we continue to make updates to the system. Unfortunately a lot of the information in the post above is outdated and we wanted to clarify a few important details on the new product.
Last week, we debuted a new functionality—“On-going Campaign and Daily Spending Limit,” which allows an advertiser to easily set up a continuous campaign with a daily stop-limit budget. Since its launch last week our daily budgeting has been adopted by 90% of advertisers. We also recently launched “Bulk Pausing and Restarting” which enables advertisers to better manage campaigns in bulk and filter by campaign status. We think these new improvements should address the major points above.
MySpace does an exceptional job of empowering MyAds customers to receive an analysis of campaign performance, however, in the break-out spreadsheet above, it says “No Daily Reporting,” which is factually incorrect. Not only does MyAds have daily reporting in the product, the reporting is updated on an hourly basis and has been core a functionality of the product since launch.
Ultimately, we wish the author would have spent more money with us to match what he spent on Facebook to ensure the comparison was reasonably balanced, but in spite of that we managed to deliver a 50% higher CTR at two-thirds the cost-per-click– making MyAds a better value for the money.
We hope this additional information is helpful to TechCrunch readers and are in contact with the guest author to update him on some of the absent MyAds product details.
Ryan’s Post:
After I had some issues with MySpace MyAds a while back, I’ve decided to dig in and come up with a much more detailed and apples-to-apples comparison of MySpace’s newly launched self-service ad platform to that of the slightly older, yet just as wet behind the ears Facebook Ads. As HubPages Communicator of Awesomeness! I have not only extensively used both of these latest attempts at the do-it-yourself advertising craze as a part of my overall marketing plan, but I have also had the chance to pick the brains of each of their management teams.
One of the first things that I found out was even though MySpace and Facebook have both created services that are similar in the fact that they’re finally able to capitalize on the data that millions of people are pumping into them daily, their implementation, strategy and vision couldn’t be any more different.
MySpace MyAds – Keeping It Creative And Looking To Monetize Now
While meeting with Adam Bain, the president of Fox Interactive Media’s audience network and the guy that Fox challenged to make some monetary magic with MySpace after they acquired the ad optimization and hypertargeting ad experts Strategic Data Corporation in 2007, it was clear that he has a plan to implement MyAds in a way that won’t affect the creativity and entertainment that MySpace has embraced since its launch in 2003. This is the main reason for him and his team deciding to go with a banner-based system as opposed to the more text-based systems that are currently used with Facebook Ads and other cost-per-click ad platforms such as Google AdSense.
Adam was also quick to let me know that the MyAds platform is now utilizing the same hypertargeting technology that they have been successfully using with larger big brand ad campaigns, such as the major mobile phone carriers (which he claims MySpace is the number one online lead generator for each of them). His overall vision for MyAds is to quickly focus on monetizing MySpace by utilizing this new hypertargeting which now gives users the ability to target a professional and creative campaign to practically anyone on MySpace based upon their interests and location. Also, he stressed that as the adoption of MyAds continues to grow he feels that that eventually the ads that most people are used to seeing on MySpace (punch the monkey) will go from being annoying to becoming something much more relevant and entertaining.
It’s probably also worth mentioning that the MyAds platform itself was built from the ground up internally by MySpace and that many of their core members came over from the team that helped Yahoo integrate their acquisition of Overture’s search advertising system. MyAds is seen as a huge revenue opportunity for MySpace and according to Adam the 40,000+ ads that have been submitted are already having an impact on their bottom line.
Facebook Ads – Monetization Taking A Backseat To Overall Growth Strategy
Facebook’s director of monetization, Tim Kendall, seemed to have a much different take on their now one year old self-service ad platform, which is an evolution from the Facebook Flyers that I once used a few years back when I was a graduate assistant at a college in Indianapolis, IN. According to Tim and despite the over half a billion dollars of funding that they’re currently burning through, Facebook’s main priority isn’t monetizing – it’s continuing to keep the now fastest growing social network of 140+ million worldwide users on pace to become something even bigger.
Growth, Tim says, is the only way to eventually get to a point to where they can start bringing in a positive cash flow and can begin turning their now venture capital devouring machine into something that can show signs of actually making some real money. Until they get to this point of growth that they’re happy with, Tim says that the proper resources required to really break out the Facebook Ads system into the mainstream won’t be available and they will continue to grow at the modest pace that they’re currently seeing.
The excitement about and around the Facebook Ads team wasn’t close to being on the same level of what I experienced when meeting the MyAds team, but I suppose that could be due to other growth-based initiatives, such as Facebook Connect, getting all of the attention. Also, as we discussed the overall vision of Facebook Ads there was much less focus on the potential effects to the overall user experience when it came to the ads being implemented into the Facebook as compared to my discussion with the MyAds team. This is probably because of the more spontaneous and community-focused nature of MySpace vs. the more connection-focused Facebook that is used more like a communications tool.