Ads Aggressively Moving into Social Networks

Arrington today on news of former client VideoEgg's new EggNetwork. He talks about their strategic direction and how it has changed over time, from a pure enabling play to powering video to monetizing video.

They're powering video on 14 of the 20 largest social networks and according to his research, this is 680 million video plays per month, from 23 million unique users. Next move is selling flash ads into Facebook apps.

As a Facebook user, I'm trying to figure out how this move will impact me -- not today, but in six months or a year. It's not hard to see that this is yet one more starfish arm who is after my eyeballs and mindshare. After a lengthy chat with Scoble at Gnomedex last week, every video, audio and content play seems to be moving in this direction -- or figuring out a way to jump on the revenue bandwagon.

He used the starfish as a metaphor for ways individuals and corporations can distribute 'messages' through social networking apps, like Facebook and others. Fellow flack Dan Greenfield who was also part of this discussion wrote about it in much more depth on his blog today.