Friendster Launches “Do It Yourself” ads

Friendster recently launched a new feature which allows anyone to place their ads in their network. Called “Do It Yourself Ads“, users can now do targeted online advertising on the massive base of Friendster. Based on the latest count, they have more than 48M registered Filipino users. What’s great about this is that you can actually do effective targeted advertising since you can specify the geography, age, gender, and even locality of your campaign. This gives you more bang for your buck since you’ll really be able to zero in on your prospects more efficiently.

Advantages of Friendster Advertising
Here are some of the advantages I see for this program:

- Being able to target by city is a very good feature. If you have a small business in a particular place, you’ll be able to advertise to users who live in that particular area. This will definitely come into play when the 2010 elections is nearing and we have a lot of local politicians looking for more creative and effective ways of reaching their constituents.

- Ad sizes are much larger compared to other SNS. For Friendster, you can either do a 300×250 image or a simple text based material. The spot is also more visible at the upper right hand corner of the profile. This can get attention much more easier compared to the ad spots of other networks.

- Option to pay either through CPM or by the number of clicks.

- Another nice feature here is that you set the budget that you will use for your campaign. Based on the site, CPM here is just $0.05 or roughly P2.30 per 1,000 impressions. If you go per click, it will cost you $0.10 or around P4.60. Note that you also have control of the duration of the campaign so you can actually spend everything at once or have spread over weeks or even months.

The only problem I have right now with this project is that they payment option is limited to Paypal. Hopefully we can expand this in the future so we can actually accept credit card transactions without having the user go through Paypal.

I’ll try running a campaign for New Media and I’ll let you guys know what happens. For more information, just head on over to their FAQ page.

(Disclaimer: Author is currently serving as the Global Digital Marketing Head of Friendster)