Facebook’s Audience Network achieved a major financial milestone in the fourth quarter of the year. For the first time, it achieved an annual run rate of $1 billion in revenue.
“The bulk of that value [was] passed to publishers, and the remainder [was] recorded as net revenue for Facebook,” a company representative said
on Thursday.
This marks the first time Facebook has revealed revenue numbers from its audience network.
Jumping on the ad network bandwagon, Facebook first launched the Facebook
Audience Network, or FAN, in mid-2014. With FAN, the social giant offered its publishing and mobile app developer partners the promise of targeting registered Facebook users wherever they go.
Since then, Facebook has expanded further into audience buying with the acquisition of LiveRail -- a video advertising supply-side platform (SSP). LiveRail helps publishers serve better video ads,
while ensuring that marketers find quality placement for their ads.
Beating out AOL, BrightRoll, and other rivals, LiveRail ranked first in video ad reach in November, according to recent
comScore findings. All told, the ad platform served ads to nearly half (48.2%) of the total U.S. population, in November.
Going forward, however, Facebook plans to steer LiveRail clients
toward its other platform properties.
“Over the coming months, Facebook will also be making changes to LiveRail [like] building out the programmatic private marketplaces and
mediation for native and video,” a company spokesman said on Thursday. “While doing so, they will no longer be accepting new customers for their ad server and will help customers
transition to Facebook's other publisher products or alternative ad servers.”