Is Facebook becoming a new mobile advertising platform?

March 17, 2009 | Matt Marshall
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One of the most explosive successes over the past year has been Apple’s iPhone. Now, with tens of thousands of developers building applications to run on the iPhone, these developers are looking for the next step: a nice way to make money from all the users they’re getting through the iPhone.

Turns out, Facebook might be a good place to start. If say, a popular game application gets a user to sign in using their Facebook account (by using something called Facebook Connect), the application owner can now tap into Facebook to find out all kinds of social data about that user, such as age and gender. This information, in turn, can be served to advertisers and marketers so that they know which applications they should be targeting.

Enter Pinch Media, a company that helps with that process. As soon as Facebook announced over the weekend that it had made it easy for iPhone applications to use Facebook Connect, Pinch swung into action. It has just released an analytics product that tracks users of Facebook Connect on iPhone applications, and provides the developers with age and gender information about their users for the first time.

This is all very early days, and it’s too early to tell whether Facebook Connect will take off in a major way, but it does possibly point to a big coming trend — especially if developers figure out its way too hard to develop a relationship of their own with users (given a user’s fatigue in creating yet another relationship) and instead opt to accessing their user info via Facebook.

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About the Author,

Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.

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