Forbes magazine called it the $15 million dollar question: Could top social networking site Facebook actually make money?

Facebook executives have revealed how they hope to answer that question with a new advertising platform that will let marketers track where the 50 million Facebook members go online and what they buy.

The goal? To keep track of all this activity so that advertisers send the most “appropriate” ads to consumers and, more importantly, sell more products and services. The company announced a new platform, called Facebook Ads, at the Ad:Tech conference in New York last month. It consists of three parts: “Social Ads,” “Targeting” and “Insights.”

Social Ads are little ads that will be attached to news feeds. They will show up on the news feeds that users and their friends subscribe to. Advertisers can bid for the right to place their ads on the feeds used by people with the specific preferences that they want to reach.

The social networking giant already listed 12 corporations including Blockbuster, CBS, JPMorgan Chase, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Sony Pictures Television and Verizon Wireless that have already signed up for Facebook Ads.

Facebook has a self-service ad targeting page where advertisers can find all sorts of specifics that members have already saved in their online profiles: movie preferences, age, gender, marital status, relationships, jobs, college choices, and favorites activities.

Another ad-oriented feature, which they call Facebook Beacon, will let third-party sites put a link to Facebook at the end of a transaction so consumers can let all their friends know what they’re buying.

Although established companies see Facebook Ads as a way to tap into the youth market, the new ad system has already sparked privacy concerns. I wrote earlier on users reaction but since then a petition has been formed for the removal of Facebook Beacon.

Some analysts have predicted that the new system will be intrusive and a threat to privacy, because Facebook users are not only unaware of the information transmission, but also are unable to block it from being transmitted. Facebook executives, however, insist that users will be able to control what advertisers know about them and their friends.