As we told you in our “recap” of Facebook happenings over the weekend Facebook is looking to start (or really continue) their own advertising service. They want to take the advertising crown from Google (and with the massive amounts of data they hoard it is possible) as they move forward into new services and after their IPO generates some new capitol for them.

The plan as we see it will involve Facebook, Facebook connected sites (any site using Facebook comments, login etc.) and of course mobile to push ads out to their “users”. This is something that Google has been very good at, in fact Google has gotten so good at it that many people do not even realize that the Google services they use are little more than gathering APIs to serve Google Ads.

So, why the “pay to promote” test? Well think about it like this; if you have a Facebook page and you want to push something (like a contest, raffle or maybe even a product launch) how many companies would be willing to pay to promote that and how much would they pay? That was the reason for the test. Facebook (more than likely) wanted to see who would use this.

So when you hear the rumors that Facebook is going to charge you for its services… well they are going to, but they are not going to charge their users directly. If they did that too many people would jump ship to platforms that are still free (like Google+). What Facebook is likely to do is take advantage of the many businesses that are using their service along with a nicely concentrated ad service that is sure to generate millions in revenue for them. Look for these changes to take place about a quarter after the IPO hits just to make sure that there is enough money to do the thing right…

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