Wall Street Seems to Like Facebook's New Personal Ad Strategy

Reuters
Rebecca Greenfield 172 Views Oct 2, 2012

Over the last month, Facebook has been spelling out its new take on advertising, a lot of which involves giving your personal information to marketers. Over that same period, its stock price, which had been in freefall since its IPO, has climbed back 25 percent, leading us to believe that Wall Street likes its new data-driven, privacy-challenging ad strategies.

Facebook knows its biggest disappointment in front of the finance world has been its inability to prove that its ads sell things. In the last month or so, we've seen the social network attempt to fix that, pushing out the following new ad-related initiatives, which also happen to target users based more on their personal data and habits than ever before.

As you can see, all of these things, in some way or another, share more personal information and habits with advertiser  in an attempt to get the right people seeing (and then buying). And just as Wall Street has noticed, so have users. Facebook has attempted to head off any concerns with a recent post on its site outlining what it does and doesn't share and how that ultimately protects users. For right now, that seems to be working well enough. Though privacy advocates have expressed worry over Facebook's partnership with Datalogix, it hasn't led to a mass exodus, nor has the Federal Trade Commission gotten involved, yet. This all leaves the social network in a pretty good place with investors, advertisers, and users—something the site hasn't seen since its public debut. 

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