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Considering that Facebook lets you set the display domain separately from the actual link domain, this behavior seems entirely intentional. Convincing people to
by sleazebreeze 10y ago
Considering that Facebook lets you set the display domain separately from the actual link domain, this behavior seems entirely intentional. Convincing people to click on ads (by lying wholesale, in this case) is a crucial element of Facebook's business model.
This does seem like they're trading long-term trust for short-term profits - users will click on fewer and fewer sponsored posts as the number of deceitful posts like this increase.
- Lxr 10y agoSadly this is likely the truth. Advertising is a unique business model that relies on thinking up increasingly creative ways of tricking users. When linkbait no longer works, lie about the source.
- ethanbond 10y ago"Unique?" Bait and switch scams have existed since the dawn of time.
- mthoms 10y agoAnd all the scams revolve around pitching something that they aren't. Which is to say they require misleading "advertising" (or more generally - marketing).
- Lxr 10y agoI was more referring to the fact that any given form of advertising basically fails by default after a certain time when people adapt to ignore it. The business therefore relies on continuously coming up with new ways to sneak content in to people's heads.
- madeofpalk 10y agoI think the case for this is to be robust for the many legitimate ways that online marketers use ads and create landing pages. Often marketing platforms (like Hubspot or whatever) lets you create multiple landing pages which might all be on a subdomain(s) to rather than handing full control of the root domain to the platform. In these cases, you wouldn't want pages.ctvnews.com to appear as the display domain. Also not to mention the myriad of services and ways that act as a middleman for the click, in the same way that the link display on Twitter appears as ctvnews.com but it's actually a t.co link
- tehwebguy 10y agoI don't buy it, it's an oversight IMO. Marketers can buy domains if they won't want to display a sub domain, and Facebook can check the final destination landing page. I mean, they already do! Every time you make a new ad they scrape the final destination for meta tags and content.
- madeofpalk 10y agoSame thing still applies - they don't want ctvnewsmarketing.com appearing as the domain.
- tehwebguy 10y agoWho doesn't, the marketers? I'm saying they should have to suck it up and buy the domain they want to display.
- cdcarter 10y agoThe issue is that they are hosting their pages on a 3rd party platform (HubSpot, Pardot, Unbounce, &c) and don't want to point root DNS at the landing page host or put bounce pages TO landing pages from the main site. They just wanna set up a pages. cname and run with it.
- tehwebguy 10y agoRight, and I'm saying that Facebook should tell them "too bad" the way Google does
- radicalbyte 10y agoI think you're right. It looks like Facebook host a lot of ads themselves, so I guess that advertisers use URL shorteners as a way to verify click throughs from Facebook. For unsophisticated advertisers (i.e. with no referrer log analysis) I guess it's pretty easy and effective.
- tehwebguy 10y agoFacebook already checks the URLs people link to for a final destination, they scrape metadata like title, photos, description. They need to add and enforce a rule like Google's.