In a December 2009 interview in New Media Age, Facebook’s director for commercial marketing in the EMEA and UK market explained that [excerpt]: CPMs on our home page are three or four times those of Yahoo’s. On click-through, the engagement levels we’re getting are 10-15 times that. Not 10% more, 10-15 times Yahoo’s click-through rates. This is where we’re selling to P&G and those big brands. The other side of our business is performance: those little square boxes, ASUs [Ad Space Units], that appear everywhere except the home page. 80% of our inventory is driven through a self-service auction model. We’re on 50bn of them a month in the UK. That’s scale. And big brands are saying they’re getting more volume and lower cost than Google on Facebook right now…The big thing we’re bringing to the market in early Q1 is Nielsen-branded research, which will reveal what people are doing, using awareness consideration and favourability metrics that are important to branded advertising. We’ll be able to quantify this via Nielsen.“
