I was reading a bunch of blog posts and articles saved from the past couple of days and I found myself thinking of a potential strategy to further monetize Facebook as a platform. Let’s call it FbSense. Got it already? There’s a twist anyway, so it’s worth keep reading :)

AdSense made Google the ginormous company it is today. Facebook is the new kid on the block in the online ads business and I don’t see a reason why they shouldn’t roll out their own flavour of AdSense using their Ads platform. In fact I would be surprised if they weren’t busily working on this, taking Google face to face on its own home turf.

According to comScore last August Facebook surpassed Google (its overall network, therefore including YouTube, GMail and the lot, not just the search engine) in terms of US time spent by people per month, wow. Microsoft with their MSN, Yahoo! and all the internet giants follow a new leader now.

However, what I just dubbed FbSense is too simplistic and may not guarantee me a position in the highest ranks of Facebook :)

The real deal would be revenue sharing a la AdSense even within Facebook itself, inside Pages. What?? Wouldn’t it be cannibalising their own revenues? Yes, in a way… but just in a way. Brands of all sizes and shapes are already investing time and money to engage users, reach new audiences, profile people smarter and all sorts of other things using Facebook pages. And more will come, more brands, more strategy, more planning, more money, more of everything. Google simply can’t do that. Unless they create some google.com/brandname page to display… to display… to display what? Certainly nothing where people spend 40 million minutes per month interacting with. Surely something could be done around YouTube and profile pages do indeed exist, but they don’t have the reach - currently and prospectively - of Facebook Pages.

Monday Note recently published some stats about the top 15 pages (for number of likes), available here. Ok, these pages are property of Facebook and an integral part of their core service/platform, but their success depends heavily on the efforts put into them by brands, so rewarding page owners with a rev share on the ads displayed/clicked on their Facebook page wouldn’t be anything strange. I personally see it as a way to foster a virtuous cycle and stronger relationships with brands/companies/artists/etc, which become even harder to break. All this goes to the long term competitive advantage of Facebook and its ecosystem.

Does it make any sense?