It appears the pressure to generate revenue is pretty much high over at Facebook. The social media giant, as the official announcement has it, is looking out for ways to monetize its search traffic. This means businesses now have the option to ‘purchase’ ad space and outrank their organically ranking competitors inside Facebook Search typeahead.

To distinguish inorganic results from organic ones, these PPC results will clearly contain the word ‘Sponsored’ (bottom right). These ads however, are different from keyword ads and unlike sidebar ads, advertisers will need to target something very ‘narrow’ and ‘exact’. Sold on CPC basis, these ads can be targeted across multiple Facebook entities i.e places, apps, pages and events.

Image Courtesy – TechCrunch

Will sponsored ads serve purpose or is Facebook greasing its own ladder?

While these ads may be less obtrusive than side-ads, users feel that this whole arrangement will jeopardize the relevance of Facebook’s search typeahead results. There is a set of people who feel that the announcement is the upshot of the company’s desperate attempt to build its own search engine. And if that’s the case, Facebook should instead build its ‘dream social search engine’ outside the baser social networking platform. Facebook search feature is seldom used by users to search for things they need. Unlike a typical search engine, it is, at best, used to find pages or people. In fact, a lot of people assert that it is a lot easier to search a brand’s Facebook page on Google than Facebook itself (Facebook is notorious for returning unofficial pages/ irrelevant results). Phew!

With all the horrid irrelevance already existing, do you think this latest experiment will bring streams of revenue to Facebook or potential advertisers? Will this sponsored search ads scheme in any way be near-lucrative when compared to Google Adwords?