Yahoo! Looking At Social Sponsorship

Social networks are the new advertising frontier. It seems everyone is talking about the impact of social advertising, but with Yahoo’s launch later this week of an actual social campaign, marketers are set to see just how much money could be made off of social networks.

by Kristina Knight

"We have this phenomenal asset we offer to marketers in our huge range of communities," said David Kopp, senior director of product management for community applications at Yahoo (via MediaPost).

The initiative, for Nissan Motors, will launch Wednesday on Yahoo! 360. Similar sponsorships on competitor MySpace have already paid off. Market research firm eMarketer estimates that MySpace alone will generate more than $500 million next year. By comparison, eMarketer expects other social sites like Yahoo! 360, MSN Spaces and Orkut by Google to offer up $95 million next year. By 2010, they forecast social network spending to reach $2.1 billion in the U.S.

The campaign trail won’t be easy, however. Yahoo! 360 lags behind competitors for unique visitors. The community saw only 5.7 million unique visitors in September. Other social sites are seeing much greater hit counts. MySpace (55.8 million unique visitors) and Facebook (13.3 million) lead the way. According to ComScore, the average user stayed on site only 11 minutes per Yahoo! session compared with 30 minutes per MySpace session.