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Facebook launches searchable transparency library of all active ads
- tumetab1 8y agoSoo.. what ads are related to penises https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=political_and_issue_ads&country=US&q=penis https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t... I'm amazed by the quantity of paid trash in Facebook.
- Nuzzerino 8y agoTitle is misleading. Only the ads related to politics or "national importance". Many of us are dead tired of that subject by now. I had my hopes up that there would be some kind of new transparency shift toward advertising in general but this isn't it.
- dang 8y agoThe page says "all active ads" more than once. Perhaps the mention of political ads is just for emphasis?
- mic47 8y agoJust type Target or other company into the search field and you'll see that it looks like all ads: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=all&country=US&q=Target&view_all_page_id=8103318119 https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t... I guess you are right and the political ads are mentioned for emphasis.
- taormina 8y agoEDIT: Apparently there's a toggle button to switch between the two result sets on Target's page.
- pmart123 8y agoNow we have the commoditization of ad copy and ad experiments. It seems like it will now be fairly easy to piece together another company's Facebook marketing and ad campaigns.
- skybrian 8y agoMaybe this sort of sharing will promote innovation in advertising? :-)
- zaksoup 8y agoIt looks like the keyword search is only for political/national importance but you can still go to a company's page and see all ads posted by that page: http://zakis.cool/tvT36o http://zakis.cool/tvT36o
- spicedune 8y agoI was blocked by Facebook after 2 searches. So much for transparency.
- RickS 8y agoWas there any feedback on the reason or mechanism for blocking?
- gkcgautam 8y agoI got blocked too. Got the following message: Blocked from Searching or Viewing the Ad Archive You have been temporarily blocked from searching or viewing the Ad Archive due to too many requests. Please try again later.
- dontbenebby 8y agoIs it really an "archive" if you can't download the contents at a reasonable rate? (Eg: I wouldn't expect gigabit speeds, but if you're willing to go slow and steady a 500k/1meg a second that should be doable)
- mateo1 8y agoThat would enforce actual transparency. We can't allow that to happen! Here's how it works: You tells us who you are and what you're looking for, then we'll see what we can show you and what we can't.
- dontbenebby 8y agoOut of curiosity do you use a VPN? I get issues like this a lot when browsing via VPN
- caiob 8y agoSame here. Not on a VPN. No ad-blocker whatsoever.
- Nextgrid 8y agoI have tried this in the UK and it seems to be limited to political ads only - I was not able to find a major brand like O2 (mobile carrier) for example.
- melvinram 8y agoIt says that right on the page: > Keep in mind, keyword searches return only ads related to politics or issues of importance. You can try your search again and select from the Page results.
- dustindiamond 8y agoWhat are issues of importance? What are not issues of importance?
- epicide 8y agoThis whole thing seems like more harm than good and an example of Facebook (intentionally or not) having a larger political influence than a "social media" company should. I think "limited to political ads only" adds to the initial problem of political ads in first place. What even counts as a "political ad"? Sure, there are obvious examples like "vote ___ for governor", but then is an advertisement for condoms a "political ad"? It's a politically charged topic, so... it depends.
- cooc 8y agoSearch for "Emmanuel Macron": 100 results, 2 from this month not from him. Search for "Donald Trump": >50K results, took me 3 minutes to scroll down to the beginning of this week It's incredible how much advertisement Trump does!
- danpalmer 8y agoThis is missing the ads from the company I work for. We do a lot of Facebook advertising. Is it US only? Edit: The link is to political only ads, although this filtering is not exposed in the UI, and when searching for the company I work for I find similarly named companies that are definitely not political. When editing the URL back to "https://www.facebook.com/ads/library" https://www.facebook.com/ads/library", and searching, it works, although the site then resets to political ads... but with more results showing. It seems there are a lot of bugs with this.
- envy2 8y agoYou have to change the country in the top right.
- danpalmer 8y agoThis did not work. It appears to return the same results as when set to the US. It is saving the country preference though.
- danpalmer 8y agoI managed to get it to work after manually editing the URLs, although clicking the wrong thing or refreshing the page would reset this.
- simlevesque 8y agoDo you know why Canada is not present ?
- doctorRetro 8y agoIt's there, but further down. The list goes Austria to United States, then Afghanistan to Zimbabwe... for some reason. Canada is in the second block. Again, for some reason.
- BartBoch 8y ago
- ada1981 8y agoApparently yoga studios running ads are often blocked for being "political" or of "national importance". Oh dear, facebook, oh dear. https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=political_and_issue_ads&country=US&q=Yoga https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...
- dymk 8y agoCherry-picked examples of an incredibly complex system failing (when it succeeds 99% of the time) aren't particularly compelling arguments against the system.
- aaya 8y agoDoes it succeed 99% of the time?
- dymk 8y agoIt's close to it. I can't remember ever seeing an ad in my newsfeed that was incorrectly labeled with a political affiliation disclaimer. Have you?
- ada1981 8y agoFrom what my results indicate, they stop the ads from running. So you wouldn't see ads that were incorrectly labeled, you WOULDN'T see ads that should be running but were incorrectly flagged as needing a political affiliation label. And from the looks of the Yoga ads, there are hundreds that have been flagged/paused as needing to disclose they are political (when they actually aren't.)
- elbrian 8y agoYour anecdotal experience is completely irrelevant to the statement that you made.
- dymk 8y ago
- eithed 8y agoI went to my FB - gotten two ads. Searched for them in this - for the first one: - wasn't able to find it by title, url, company name, nothing, regardless if filtering by my home country, or country I'm at currently - second one - the Economist, showed 12 results, with an option to Subscribe to each one of them; what does that mean? shouldn't I already be "subscribed" to at least one of those?
- krisroadruck 8y agoI wish they would just launch a friggin paid option. No ads, no data collection (for selling, I understand they need some to literally make the site function). I happily pay youtube for an adfree experience and wouldn't balk at doing the same for facebook.
- AH4oFVbPT4f8 8y agoHow much would you be willing to pay? $10/mo, $50/mo ? They see more potential in keeping it free and selling you then trying to collect money from you.
- gatherhunterer 8y agoYour data is the most valuable thing you have to offer and you give it up for free. Why would they install a barrier to people giving away the the most monetized asset in their business sector? Why would they let you avoid seeing ads? A user who doesn’t look at ads to drive the value of user data is worse than a non-user; at least a non-user doesn’t cost them any overhead.
- dmitriid 8y agoThey have a paid option. Advertisers pay them to show you ads and get your data. You are not a customer. You are the product. Produce doesn't get to chose how and where it is displayed.
- morsmodr 8y agoThis!
- darkpuma 8y agoIt would only be a matter of time before they started showing ads to paying users too. Pay for a magazine subscription? Magazine is filled with ads anyway. Pay for a cable tv subscription? Filled with ads anyway. Pay for HBO? Get shameless product placement (they claim they don't take money for it, but that doesn't change the substance of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuIJVLrIAZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuIJVLrIAZQ) Pay for netflix? More product placement. Pay to see a movie? Ads before the movie, product placement throughout. Pay for Hulu? More like paying for ads.
- swalsh 8y agoI've personally never seen a public company have such a real time insight into the primary revenue driver of the company. In theory this should be the most effecient stock on the market. Even if this is only a portion of the overall revenue, I'm interested to see how this could affect the performance of their stock in the market.
- rja907 8y agoTrump has spent around $11M on ads just on Facebook. If you go into the ad details you'll see how he targets different genders, age groups according to states: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=all&country=US&q=Donald%20J.%20Trump&view_all_page_id=153080620724 https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_t...
- bacondude3 8y agoI think it's even more interesting to see the Democrat side: * O'Rourke $8.4M * Harris $1.6M * Warren $1.3M * Booker $800K * Sanders $685K * Klobuchar $365K * Yang $120K * Buttigieg $10.5K Why is everybody else spending so much less than O'Rourke? Does his campaign actually have that much more money compared to the other campaigns?
- ranie93 8y agohttps://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/18/beto-orourke-support-from-big-tech-could-be-blessing-curse-in-2020.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/18/beto-orourke-support-from-bi... https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/qvy58m/beto-orourke-tops-the-field-in-first-day-fund-raising-but-hes-being-vague-about-it https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/qvy58m/beto-orourke-tops... https://www.thoughtco.com/bundling-political-contributions-legal-and-illegal-3367621 https://www.thoughtco.com/bundling-political-contributions-l...
- bmm6o 8y agoO'Rourke just finished a huge campaign for the Senate in November, I assume it's that and not his just-launched presidential bid. (Disclaimer - I find the site hard to use and maybe it's obvious to someone else that it's not correct)
- cm2012 8y agoThis has been available for a while from all company's pages, but it's cool to see it in searchable format. EDIT: Ah, only political ads are searchable, but all ads are findable by looking up a company page. Just like before, so there's not much actually new here.
- glitcher 8y agoWas there previously a way to do these searches without a company page, or without a Facebook account at all? If not, I would consider this a big change!
- SnowingXIV 8y agoIt would really neat if they also included all the targeting options that were used on the ads as well. Currently you can gather that by seeing age, gender, and location but specific groups, etc that were used aren't available.
- coderintherye 8y agoThis is really interesting, can see ads by anti-vaxxers, for instance this one runs a lot of them https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?view_all_page_id=1797590283821718&country=US https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?view_all_page_id=17975...
- whatever_dude 8y agoWow this is a library of conspiracy theory ads. Surprised I didn't see a chemtrail one in there.
- CamelCaseName 8y agoNeat. You can use this find out what Lyft pays drivers as a signup bonus in different cities. https://i.imgur.com/pqwQzZg.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pqwQzZg.jpg
- TicklishTiger 8y agoIt must be possible to do a/b tests on FB? Maybe they don't show the variations but just a random one?
- SeriousM 8y agoIt's too late, no one cares, right?
- nautical 8y agohttps://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/?source=archive-landing-page&country=IN https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/?source=archive-... Its interesting to see how much political parties are spending on Facebook Ads.
- myegorov 8y agoTo its credit, Twitter has been doing this for some time now.
- kriro 8y agoQuicksearch for Germany for some political parties: SPD: 880 adds FDP: 96 adds Grüne: 3 adds Die Linke: 2 AFD: 2 adds CSU: 1 add CDU: 0 adds (?!) Obviously there's a lot of subpages (youth organisations, state organisations) as well but I found it interesting that only one party (or two if you want to count FDP) seems to actively use FB adds linked to their official pages. Will be interesting to poke around in this dataset. Looking for something downloadable. The dropdown for weekly CSV-files only shows USA, India and UK. I'm not sure it's that useful because it only contains "Page Name", "Disclaimer", "Amount Spent", "Number of Ads in Library". The actual adds would be much more interesting :)
- hobofan 8y agoWould be interesting to see how that changes for the European Parliament election. The offline advertising for that should pop up soon, and maybe at the same time the online ads will too.
- antpls 8y agoThis is PR smoke, they need to make the whole dataset publicly available and downloadable for it to be useful
- beenBoutIT 8y agoThere's no way in hell that foreign countries waited until 2016 to test out online propaganda campaigns. Anyone in Congress with half a brain would think to check previous elections for similar evidence of 'meddling'. It's far more likely that online election meddling dates back to MySpace and AOL or earlier.