Emarketer had an interesting report that looked at social network advertising. While Facebook is the face of social networking to most of the press, eMarketer projects that Facebook will only capture 20% of the ad spend on social networks in 2008., compared to 54% for MySpace.

Facebook stumbled last year with its roll-out of their Beacon Platform, while MySpace has quietly launched its HyperTargeting system. HyperTargeting allows marketers on MySpace to target ads based on 1,000 different issues and hobbies that members describe in their profiles. The eMarketer study would seem to indicate that MySpace is much more advertiser friendly than Facebook.

When you look at the actual dollars that are being spent on social networks , it is interesting that niche social networks already have $150 million in advertising, putting them close to all other general social networks other than MySpace and Facebook. It appears that advertisers understand that the power of social networks is conversational marketing and small niche social networks are much more suited to this type of marketing than large general social networks.

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