Facebook Redesign a good thing for Advertisers?

It began a couple days ago, Facebook users could check out the new layout with all its aesthetically pleasing appeal simply by visiting http://www.new.facebook.com. Now starting this morning users have been given the prompts enticing them to switch over and try it out.

So what is new?

• New Menu Bar
• Mini-Feed and Wall are now under the wall tab
• A new “Bio” box
• Complete rearrangement of tabs for your wall, info, photos, and apps
• Facebook Apps are now found in the “Boxes” tab
• Users can add extra tabs
• Use your webcam to take a photo or record a video to add to your collection or post on the Wall of your friends

So what does this mean to advertisers and affiliate marketers using Facebook Ads? Well the first thing I noticed was that there is an additional ad unit on the right side of the page. The old layout had simply one ad unit on the left hand side of the page, and now there seems to be more white space as well as not one but two ad units on the right. (Note: after surfing for awhile the two ad units switched back to 1, so this may be facebook’s way of controlling click fraud.) This only applies to profiles however. The “home” page no longer has ANY ad units on it whatsoever, and affiliates are going to see a drop in traffic from this undoubtedly.

Facebook may simply be doubling its rev share with this move but more importantly this will mean more competition for affiliate marketers. Instead of having prime placement for your campaigns, you will now have to compete with a secondary offer either above or below your ad, and while I am not certain whether or not the ad’s being displayed are by the same advertisers, my best guess would be that you are competing directly now for the traffic.

Another big change that advertisers are going to notice is that the applications have been moved into their own panel. This is a grey area since I haven’t really done any work with Facebook app’s as of yet, but any advertisers out there that use Facebook applications for promotions and campaigns, it would be interesting to see what kind of changes you see because of this.

Overall I don’t really mind the new redesign, although I feel that a lot of the less internet savvy users are going to have issues adapting to the changes. The wall and mini-feed conjoined isn’t really a bad move, and the custom tabs leaves room for a lot of customization so I think Facebook might be on to something with that. Let’s just hope they don’t take the customization too far and turn into Myspace 2.0.