Virtual Pants

Facebook engineers have built technology that lets the company track what apps people have on their phones and target ads based on that information, these people said. Facebook would charge companies every time an app is installed on users’ smartphones, one of the people said. Facebook can charge significantly more for an app installation than it can for the traditional cost of every one thousand people who have viewed an ad.

Facebook is starting to feel the pressure from investors to increase mobile revenue. This particular scheme sounds very similar to the ‘Genius’ feature in the App Store. It will be very interesting to see how Apple and Google respond to this type of advertising, which is based upon the contents of a mobile device, not the content a user has voluntarily shared on Facebook.