Google admits Advertisng on Social Networks not going well

Despite Social Networks being the most popular destinations on the web and they making efforts to boost their ad platforms advertising has not really been very successful on social networks and Google just confirmed it in their conference call to showcase their last quarter earnings.

CFO George Reyes said social networking advertising is not monetizing as expected. When questioned further Sergey Brin, president of technology, said: “We don’t talk about individual partners or anything like that.” Brin noted some things were tried that didn’t pan out. While Brin won’t talk about partners it’s fairly obvious that MySpace is an issue. Google is obligated to pay at least $900 million in minimum revenue guarantees to MySpace through 2010. Later, the question was revisited again. He noted that Google also has Orkut and other social networking partners. “We have an incredible amount of this inventory,” said Brin. “I don’t think we have the killer best way to monetize social networks yet. We have had a lot of experiments (and some disappointments).”

Unlike search advertising (where a user is shown an ad when he is looking for something which leads to greater success of ad) in social networking space users is more interested in his own activities and those of his friends and advertising here is more disruptive here so it is not likely to be as effective. However with the number of people available this is an obvious market which needs to be tapped lets wait and watch as to how it evolves (Via Zdnet)