NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- I first saw the story over at Bloomberg. And it's the first time since the company put social media on the map that I think Facebook (FB) might be prepared to change the game. 
 
 According to the Bloomberg report, Facebook will start offering "TV-style" 15-second commercials to advertisers for up to $2.5 million a pop later this year. 
 
 Think about it. Over one billion total users. About 800 million checking in monthly on a mobile device. Roughly half a billion daily. At first brush, you think traditional television cannot compete. That's not entirely true. But if Facebook does this and has even modest success, it could be a game changer nonetheless. 
 
 For some types of Facebook advertising, you really don't need to spend a ton of money. 
 
 As an example, I buy promoted posts and sponsored stories for TheStreet's Facebook page . At a certain point, engagement such as social sharing takes over and provides value in lieu of spending more money. Simply put, I have heard of brands spending five or six figures per promoted post/sponsored story. That makes no sense when you can achieve considerable organic growth triggered by a relatively small expenditure. 
 
 However, with a TV-style commercial, it's a different ball game. It's taking a traditional advertising concept -- the television spot -- and putting it to work on a platform with massive scale and (depending on who you ask) impressive engagement. In some respects, this is like advertising on the Super Bowl any day of the year. 
 
 Consider the numbers. 
 
 Last year, roughly 108 million Americans watched the Super Bowl. The National Football League routinely makes the claim that the game is "available to an estimated worldwide audience of 750 million to 1 billion people." However, research shows that nowhere near that number watch the game. In fact, a vast majority of viewing happens inside North America with a relatively small portion coming from abroad. As such we might be looking at something closer to 110 to 120 million viewers worldwide this past January. 
 
 From a pure numbers standpoint, an advertisement for $2.5 million on Facebook could, theoretically, get in front of more people than the $4 million companies spend on a 30-second Super Bowl spot. But "get in front of" are the keywords. 
 
 Which audience is more engaged? Some people tune into the Super Bowlto see the commercials. That's why you drop the $4 million; you have an audience longing to see your advertising for a change. At the moment, many users view Facebook ads as an intrusion. That doesn't mean they will not work or they're not valuable. In fact, for some companies, by some measures, a Facebook ad will be just as powerful -- and maybe more so -- than a Super Bowl ad. 
 
 All of that to say, yes, Facebook has something here. It could be a game changer, however, be skeptical if the tech/financial media starts putting out "Super Bowl Killer" or "Network Television Killer" headlines in regards to the possibility of Facebook TV commercials. You know they'll do this just the way they refer toas a killer or dongle as an Apple TV orkiller. That's premature and overhyped. 
 
 Something else to keep in mind. Traditional television platforms continue to mature digitally. As these digital and mobile strategies grow and evolve, big media will command higher rates for advertising, particularly if they can sell it across a set of platforms that includes actual television sets. That's something, at the moment, Facebook cannot do. 
 
 -- ||||| It only took a little more than a year, but Facebook stock has finally returned to its IPO price of $38 a share. 
 
 The stock flirted with the $38 mark in trading Tuesday, coming within four cents before ending the day at $37.63, a gain of more than 6% on the day. Facebook topped $38 in pre-market trading and climbed as high as $38.31 in the opening minutes of trading Wednesday, its first time trading above its IPO price since going public on May 18, 2012. 
 
 See also: How Facebook Has Changed Since Going Public 1 Year Ago 
 
 Facebook received a late afternoon bump from a report in Bloomberg that reasserted the social network is planning to sell TV-style commercials on its site for as much as $2.5 million a day. Much of the stock's upward momentum, however, is due to its impressive earnings report from last week, which revealed better-than-expected progress on mobile user growth and ad revenue. 
 
 Facebook was one of the most hotly anticipated public offerings in recent memory, but the stock has been plagued by investor concerns about the company's ability to adjust to and profit off users' continued shift to mobile devices. Some of those concerns stem from Facebook's decision to revise its revenue estimates downward shortly before the IPO, noting that it wasn't serving enough mobile ads to keep pace with users moving to smartphones. 
 
 In October, shortly after Facebook's stock hit its all-time low of $17.55 a share, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the earnings call to argue that Facebook's mobile problem was little more than a myth. "We're just getting started," he said at the time. 
 
 Sure enough, mobile ads accounted for 14% of total ad revenue that quarter, 23% the next quarter and 30% the following quarter. In the most recent quarter ending in June, analysts had expected that percentage to climb to about 33%, but Facebook surprised analysts and investors by reporting that mobile ads now account for 41% of total ad revenue — a remarkable number when you consider that it was essentially 0% a little more than a year ago. 
 
 "The results should put to rest many of the concerns that so many investors have had since the IPO, broadening the stock's investor base," Brian Wieser, a senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group, wrote in an investor note shortly after the earnings. "Fretting about Facebook as the next MySpace will probably go the way of MySpace." 
 
 Since releasing its second quarter earnings a week ago, Facebook's stock has surged more than 40%, adding more than $25 billion to the company's market cap. 
 
 FB data by YCharts 
 
 Facebook is still below its all-time high of $45 a share, which it hit briefly on its first day of trading, but passing its IPO mark is significant for investors who may have refrained from investing previously, as well as for the morale of employees at the company. 
 
 For anyone who invested in the early days, however, it's not quite fair to say that early Facebook investors have broke even. The S&P 500 index increased 30% during the period since Facebook went public. After a long and rocky road, Facebook stock has now increased by precisely 0%. 
 
 Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images ||||| Facebook Inc. (FB), seeking to break the long-held dominance of television over advertising budgets, plans to sell TV-style commercials on its site for as much as $2.5 million a day, two people familiar with the matter said. 
 
 The world’s largest social-networking site, which has 1.15 billion members, expects to start offering 15-second spots to advertisers later this year, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the plans aren’t public. Facebook rose above the $38 initial public offering price in early trading. 
 
 The move would follow efforts by Facebook’s online rivals to capture ad dollars that have traditionally gone to TV networks. Google Inc. (GOOG) began funding original content channels on its YouTube video-sharing site in recent years, giving it a more curated venue for commercials. A year ago, AOL Inc. (AOL) started HuffPost Live, a CNN-like video stream running five days a week. 
 
 With Facebook, the idea would be to capitalize on the millions of users who actively check the site on a daily basis, including during the prime-time hours coveted by television advertisers. As of last quarter, 61 percent of Facebook members were using the site daily -- a number that has risen despite management predictions that it would decline. 
 
 Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg Karl Petersen, Lulea's mayor, walks past a logo at Facebook Inc.'s new data storage center near the Arctic Circle in Lulea, Sweden. Close Karl Petersen, Lulea's mayor, walks past a logo at Facebook Inc.'s new data storage... Read More Close Open Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg Karl Petersen, Lulea's mayor, walks past a logo at Facebook Inc.'s new data storage center near the Arctic Circle in Lulea, Sweden. 
 
 “Every night, 88 million to 100 million people are actively using Facebook during prime-time TV hours in the United States alone,” Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said last week on a conference call about second-quarter results. 
 
 Elisabeth Diana, a spokeswoman for Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, declined to comment on its advertising plan. 
 
 Shares Rise 
 
 Optimism over Facebook’s advertising prospects has helped the stock rebound after dropping as much as 53 percent below the $38 price of its May 2012 initial public offering. The stock fell 2.2 percent today to $36.80. 
 
 While the social network already allows advertisers to upload videos to their Facebook page and then broadcast them to a user’s news feed, the new service would let marketers buy their way directly into a person’s feed with a 15-second pitch, according to the people. That’s typically the minimum length of a television commercial. 
 
 At 15 seconds, the ads also would be the same length as Facebook’s Instagram videos -- a feature that was added to the company’s photo-sharing service last month. That means the commercials would come in a familiar format for users. 
 
 Three Showings 
 
 The commercials will initially be sold on a full-day basis and can only be targeted to users based on age and gender, according to the people. That would be a break from how ad units are currently sold on Facebook, which lets marketers target ads based on location and areas of interest -- data points that television networks generally don’t offer. By relying on fewer categories, Facebook is mimicking the way television ads are purchased, an attempt to make the process more comfortable for executives accustomed to TV, the people said. 
 
 Facebook members won’t see a commercial more than three times in a given day, the people said. Depending on how large an audience an advertiser plans to reach, the ads will range in price from $1 million to about $2.5 million a day, according to the people. 
 
 Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who has been working with global marketing head Carolyn Everson on the video ad service, pushed back the start date at least twice, wanting to make sure Facebook’s user experience won’t be tainted by the ads, according to the people. Zuckerberg wants high-definition video and easy-to-use playback features, the people said. 
 
 No Decline 
 
 Zuckerberg said last week that he’s sensitive to how users react to advertising in general. He plans to limit the amount of ads people see to about one for every 20 updates. That would comprise about 5 percent of a user’s news feed. 
 
 “One of the things I watch most closely is the quality of our ads and people’s sentiment around them,” Zuckerberg said. “We haven’t measured a meaningful drop in satisfaction.” 
 
 Even so, television remains the undisputed king of the ad world. Advertisers plan to spend almost twice as much on television as on digital media this year, according to ZenithOptimedia, a research unit of Publicis Groupe SA. Internet ads are expected to reach $36.2 billion, or 22 percent of all media purchases, while TV advertising will garner $63.9 billion, or 38 percent. 
 
 Facebook’s move also would step up competition with social-networking rival Twitter Inc., which has been courting TV advertisers in its bid to reach $1 billion in sales by 2014. Earlier this month, the microblogging site expanded a service that markets direct promotions to viewers who tweet about shows they’re watching on television. 
 
 Twitter Partnerships 
 
 Twitter also has built partnerships with television networks such as Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN; Viacom Inc.’s MTV and Nickelodeon; and Time Warner Inc., owner of TNT, TBS and CNN. The agreements let the company stream videos on its site and split the resulting ad revenue with the networks, a person familiar with the matter said earlier this year. 
 
 Silicon Valley companies have had difficulty luring away ad dollars from television networks because of a lack of a single measurement system that compares TV audiences directly to Internet audiences. Figures from measurement companies such as ComScore Inc. are difficult to compare against ratings from Nielsen, the dominant firm for measuring TV ratings. 
 
 Nielsen started working with Facebook three years ago on an effort to count Internet viewership the same way it does with television. Nielsen relies on Facebook’s user data to create ratings measurements for online content, whether it’s an ad or a TV show streamed over the Internet. 
 
 Facebook sees the Nielsen partnership as a boon in its effort to sell more video advertising, an executive familiar with the plans said. Advertisers will be willing to spend more if they’re able to present comparable Nielsen ratings figures, the person said. 
 
 In a separate report released today, Nielsen found that Facebook attracts more 18- to 24-year-old people during prime-time viewing hours than any of four major television networks. 
 
 To contact the reporter on this story: Edmund Lee in New York at elee310@bloomberg.net 
 
 To contact the editors responsible for this story: Nick Turner at nturner7@bloomberg.net; Pui-Wing Tam at ptam13@bloomberg.net
– If you were one of the investors who bought into the Facebook IPO hype on day one, take heart—you're finally back where you started! The stock crossed the magic $38 mark in premarket trading this morning, Mashable reports, after closing just a hair shy of the mark yesterday. It was buoyed by a report yesterday from Bloomberg saying that the social network was hoping to sell TV-esque ads for as much as $2.5 million a day. If Facebook is really pushing ads to all 1.15 billion of its users, that would make it a Super Bowl-scale advertising opportunity that "could be a game changer," writes Rocco Pendola at The Street. "From a pure numbers standpoint, an advertisement for $2.5 million on Facebook could, theoretically, get in front of more people than the $4 million companies spend on a 30-second Super Bowl spot." But there are caveats; read his full post for more.