The post below was written by Ryan Hupfer at HubPages. A couple of weeks ago HubPages ads were blocked from MySpace’s new self serve ad platform, MyAds, as being competitive to MySpace. That problem was fixed, but Ryan, who advertises on both MySpace and Facebook, wrote a post comparing the two platforms.
His results are below.
In a nutshell, he finds Facebook a much better experience. When it comes to the results, though, things are mixed. Ryan’s test showed a lower cost per click on MySpace than Facebook ($.15 v. $.44). A new registered user cost just $4.46 on MySpace, v. $5.11 on Facebook. But another action, getting registered users to write content on HubPages, shows Facebook far in the lead – $16.77 per registered “Hub” on Facebook v. $24.95 on MySpace.
The results, though, can’t be taken too seriously, for a number of reasons. First, Ryan spent $3,119 on Facebook ads and only $125 on MySpace (he says MySpace ads are much harder to administer, so he spent less). But that difference alone makes the results unreliable. Second, Facebook has text ads, MySpace has display ads, so the results are not apples-to-apples. Third, there are some irregularities with the results – his average CPC on MySpace is $.15, but that platform has a minimum CPC of $.25. Ryan says the data is accurate as reported by those platforms.
That gets me to the biggest reason the test isn’t scientific – both MySpace and Facebook knew about it. Ryan interviewed both extensively for the post. Since both knew this was coming, they both had incentives to help his ads get better performance. In the case of MySpace, something weird definitely happened.
But the post is valuable in that it shows what a real world advertiser thinks of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the platforms. Based on this, we may commission a true third party test of each of them, without notice to either company. Those results will be more relevant.