For those with their own ad network the obvious benefit is in better targeting of customer's ads to users. The more clicks they get the happier the customers are and the more money they make from their cut of the ad spend.
They also provide a lot of tools to view and examine the data to the advertisers so they can tailor their ads in some way. Most of the times you click one of these ads your user_id or email is sent to the advertisers and they can make pretty good use of that data as well.
That's the obvious one but they also sell the data to market research companies who analyse it and package it up for resale as "customer engagement profiles" or some other euphemism for poorly anonymized user tracking data.
I have no experience with Facebook here but with Google and Yahoo there is an understanding between big advertisers and their account reps about API abuse. Someone's personal credit card rents a few VPS's and some perl scripts start pulling in everything they can and even if they go over the API limits by a few orders of magnitude they never get blocked.
For any ad network or other service provider who has a resource like an ad unit or a like or +1 button everywhere on the web and can track people, the user tracking data is a major revenue stream, both for internal use and external.
They also provide a lot of tools to view and examine the data to the advertisers so they can tailor their ads in some way. Most of the times you click one of these ads your user_id or email is sent to the advertisers and they can make pretty good use of that data as well.
That's the obvious one but they also sell the data to market research companies who analyse it and package it up for resale as "customer engagement profiles" or some other euphemism for poorly anonymized user tracking data.
I have no experience with Facebook here but with Google and Yahoo there is an understanding between big advertisers and their account reps about API abuse. Someone's personal credit card rents a few VPS's and some perl scripts start pulling in everything they can and even if they go over the API limits by a few orders of magnitude they never get blocked.
For any ad network or other service provider who has a resource like an ad unit or a like or +1 button everywhere on the web and can track people, the user tracking data is a major revenue stream, both for internal use and external.