Facebook, a service that lets people set up their
personal Web pages, is seen as the next big venue
for placing online display ads. The company has
nearly 50 million users, many of them the young
audience that advertisers covet. In addition to
selling ads on its own, the company over the past
year has started placing ads through a deal it
signed last year with Microsoft, under which
Microsoft brokers banner ads on Facebook's U.S.
site until 2011.