A recent article by the International Herald Tribune summarises the challenges starting to face advertisers who want to take advantage of the growing popularity of social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. As the increase in global advertising spending on social networks is forecast to grow to $3.6 billion by 2011, up from just $445 million this year - according to eMarketer - then the opportunities and issues facing advertisers becomes more of a factor.

The article recounts recent cases where leading brand name advertisers have placed ads on some of these networks and found the 'associations' of their placement against ever-changing content to be unacceptable to their positioning. Clearly the owners of these sites need to manage advertising placement to avoid these concerns if the market is to grow, but at the same time advertisers need to consider the focus of their campaigns whilst still taking advantage of the huge traffic numbers that can be reached.