Facebook Sells User Data for Atlas Ads
San Francisco, Sep 30 (EFE).- Social networking giant Facebook has unveiled a new platform in which it provides its users' data to advertisers so that they can place their ads more effectively on third party sites.
The platform Atlas will gather data from Facebook and use it on external websites. This means that if a user clicks "Like" on the social networking site of sports shoes, ads of similar products may appear on other websites.
The data collected through Facebook is drawn from a history of the tastes and interests of each user, allowing advertisers to better identify their potential buyers.
Facebook, that bought Atlas from Microsoft last year for a sum of $100 million, finally launched it on Monday after a complete design overhaul.
Until now, Facebook was selling advertising space on the social network and using cookies to track the tastes of the users as they surfed the internet so that they could be shown ads according to their preferences.
This new method is designed, in principle, to improve the effectiveness of the advertising as cookies are often inaccurate and don't track well on mobile devices, something that Atlas will do through Facebook.
This new venture is Facebook's attempt to close the gap with its main competitor in online advertising, Google, which continues to lead by a wide margin.
In the second quarter, Google notched up earnings of $14.36 billion from advertising against Facebook's $2.68 billion, which is nearly five times less. EFE
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