Meet The Facebook Audience Network For Mobile Ads

Facebook has announced its long-anticipated mobile ad network. Formally called the Facebook Audience Network, it brings the full weight of Facebook’s ad targeting data to third party mobile apps — and becomes an immediate rival to the Google Display Network for mobile.

Currently iOS and Android are supported. There are also a number of available ad formats:

Right now it’s only available in beta and developers will need to apply for the program. The benefit of using Facebook Audience Network is the richness, breadth and specificity of the targeting data available to marketers. In theory these ads will also be more relevant to mobile users.

The fact that Facebook calls this “Facebook Audience Network” and not “Facebook Mobile Network” suggests that over time the company may roll this out for the PC web as well. It’s logical and represents a significant potential revenue opportunity for the company.

Google Network (AdSense) revenue last quarter was $3.4 billion. It makes lots of ad-sense for Facebook to move online with this eventually and make it truly cross platform.

As we learn more we’ll provide more detail and perspective.