Facebook's Rate Card Problem

As we mentioned earlier, Facebook’s revenue per unique visitor pales in comparison to other big Internet companies. This comes despite the fact that Facebook is the leader in terms of display ads served, by a wide margin. The problem boils down to low CPM rates for social networking. Another JP Morgan analyst recently put together a chart showing the rates for display ads on various types of sites.

The top rate of $10.41 goes for Business/Finance sites (which account for about 2% of all ads). Social networking, on the other hand, gets the lowest rates of the 10 categories studied. These ads generate a CPM of only $0.55, yet they make up 27% of the display ad market. See the whole chart here.