DISQUS

Hi Eric - we look forward to hearing about your experiences. You should also try our self-serve remarketing/retargeting platform, now open in Beta to everyone. We plug into the leading ad exchanges (Right Media and Doubleclick AdX) and off-exchange networks we have relationships with as well.

We also plug into Google Content Network, but that is not relevant for retargeting of course.

Find out more here: http://cpmadvisors.com/?q=retargeting

Apparently these ads are no longer being shown: Facebook themselves thought they were deceptive and asked the company(ies) showing them to take them down. Very clever 'social engineering' though.

It's been interesting to watch -- you can point to dozens of companies in the online space that start out as something (analytics, panel, behavioral targeting data provider, feed aggregator, search engine) but eventually become... an ad network! Is that the direction Quantcast eventually goes in?

Half-jokingly, I admit... I like their data, and I'm sure so do the hundreds or thousands of guys out there that have been scraping their pages for search terms...

I don't see this as threatening LinkedIn in the business sphere at all... especially not when, according to Facebook's own numbers the average age of their audience is still 22 years of age. They're seeing the most growth in the 30+ crowd obviously but there's still a long way to go to get any kind of critical mass there. I see a tremendous amount of resistance from most of my early-30s friends to getting onto Facebook whereas LinkedIn was a nobrainer for them 1-2 years ago. They'll come around, but I still don't see Facebook being much of a productivity tool until there is some serious separation between the work and play aspects; or until a demographic shift occurs: enough time goes by that the generation that has been growing up with these features and expects work and play to be so intertwined get into the seats of power. I see a lot of ANDs with LinkedIn and Facebook, not ORs (though ORs tell a sexier more newsworthy story).

Alexa data is from people who use Alexa, who also disproportionately (obviously) tend to be trendwatchers and market research buffs. {An interesting experiment to try is to check out Alexa traffic for market research companies like Forrester, Jupiter, Greenfield etc. -- way higher ranking/traffic than they actually have} The demographics of the Alexa-using audience thus also skews away from the MySpace demographic... so two reasons not to trust Alexa data for this issue.

Cool video piece, good sleuthing.... though I'd say that (1) probably most of this is currently confined as Phil says to remnant traffic where true impressions volume is available so as to have a good chance of "hitting" on cookies that have been set, not to mention that the cost of testing is really low and it's the type of spot where a move up from 0.1% to 0.2% really has some impact and (2) people would probably be surprised if they knew the extent to which this was already going on... but people are arguably going to be more sensitive because of the link to a lot of personal information in Facebook.