Social Ad Networks: Win, Lose, or Draw?

It wasn’t so long ago that social advertising networks were scarce and select. While they arguably still retain their selectness when placed adjacent to the world of general advertising on the Web, their number has grown considerably in the last several seasons and the industry is now very much a bustling marketplace.

Though larger economic woes afflicting the globe may put a bit of a damper on growth in the short term, the social sphere is altogether rising, and thus the advertising field that functions in tandem in all its various colors is growing more and more active.

In recognition of industrial expansion in the social realm, particularly at this moment steadily converging networking and media efforts, altogether forming very potent monetary opportunities, we’ve decided to take a sort of snapshot of some of the actors in the marketing business, if only to see how it has evolved to become the burgeoning moneypot it is today. We don’t mean to offer an overview here of what each offers individually. Rather, this is more a collective observation of what has occurred and, with a healthy bit of educated guesswork, envision what is to come.

There are the big name actors which tend to make the largest of headlines. Google involves itself in the social networking and social media spaces both, to various degrees. Its services have been adopted by a segment of Facebook application developers, for instance. It maintains some presence on MySpace, too. Also, Facebook itself has operated an ad network of its own for some time, though it primarily addresses the desires of marketers to target niche audiences and buy bulk placement in one sweep. There’s nothing small or selective that any of these names are attempting to do with in-house resources.

Independent outfits, meanwhile, are more open to a variety of commitments, and can go quite far in bringing special attention on the quality of service behind the distribution push. Names like SocialMedia, Lookery, iLike, AdBrite, VideoEgg,