Inside Facebook

While Facebook has passed MySpace in global visits as of last month, what does it really mean for the company’s ad business?

Making use of Google Trends’ recently updated service for websites in combination with some data on international ad markets shared by Jeremy Liew, Andrew Chen recently came to the conclusion that Facebook has surpassed MySpace in several of the world’s top international ad markets as of Q4 2007.

(Chart by Andrew Chen)

While the US remains the largest ad market by far (in fact, it’s bigger than all others combined), Facebook is demonstrating that social networks can gain ground against an incumbent in meaningful markets after all. Whether Facebook can maintain that lead tomorrow remains to be seen.