Social Machinery

According to data provided by comScore regarding digital advertising spending for the first quarter in the U.S., Facebook could reach a advertising revenue potential of $ 1,500 million USD during this year. Additionally, the Social network sites is leading online advertising impressions in the U.S.

ComScore estimates that ad display spending in the United States was around 2,700 million dollars in the first quarter of 2010. The average CPM was around $ 2.48 USD and Facebook got 16% of total display advertising in the market, representing more than 176,000 million impressions available in the first quarter. If we apply an average CPM of $ 2.48 Facebook’s potential revenues for the first quarter would have been just under $ 440 millions. If we multiply this number by four quarters of the year, we get over 1,700 million USD in potential advertising revenue for 2010 in the U.S. alone. On the other hand, we should take into account a correction factor due to some low periods as a result of decreasing advertising investment expected for this year.

In this way, Facebook revenues for this year should be in range of 1.300 to 1.5000 million USD for this year. This extrapolation could have some inaccuracies, mainly because the CPM price oscillations during different campaigns. Facebook has the volume but what is your advertising?

Online display advertising volume grew at the rate of 15% during the first quarter of 2010 compared to the same period one year ago. The United States has reached 1.1 trillion displays ads for the first time during the first quarter 2010. In that sense, Facebook was quick to improve ad inventory offering, socializing their advertising formats. The social network seeks not only to provide the widest reach online but also to provide social recommendations capabilities leveraging on the power of user’s social graph.

Is also quite impressive to see how Facebook is providing more inventory than any other online site.  The popular social networking site  led all online publishers during Q1 with 176 billion display ad impressions. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 132 billion impressions (12.1%), followed by Microsoft Sites with 60 billion impressions (5.5%) and Fox Interactive Media with 53 billion impressions (4.9%).