As we’ve written about many times here on Lost Remote, Facebook is a huge new player in the local advertising space. And today, a research company says Facebook is seeing a big jump in self-serve advertising.
“We believe it accounted for about half of all ad spending on Facebook,” eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson told AdAge. “It’s really become a tremendous business for the company. We didn’t account for the size of that business last year in our estimate, but we found that it’s become a great tool for direct-marketing advertisers.” eMarketer estimates Facebook will book $1.285 billion in total ad revenue this year.
Self-serve has been the holy grail of sorts for local publishers, but there have been few true success stories. Early attempts have discovered that an “assisted self-serve” model is more effective, which involves some level of human interaction with clients to get the ball rolling. Really, there’s only been one “pure” self-serve success — Google — until Facebook’s recent success. Clearly, it appears that massive scale (to the point of becoming a household word) is a big element of self-serve success.
