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>> It's a terrible ad network It's a $70bn ad network. All that revenue comes from highly liquid ad budgets. It's naive to conclude that fb ads "don't work" fr
by dalbasal 6y ago
>> It's a terrible ad network
It's a $70bn ad network. All that revenue comes from highly liquid ad budgets. It's naive to conclude that fb ads "don't work" from anecdote... Not working most of the time is the norm for advertising, but the scale comes from the cases where it does work.
- throwaway2048 6y agoA lot more than 70 billion dollars has been spent on things that not only don't work, but are impossible, even in theory.
- aerosmile 6y agoWhy a throwaway account? Let's hear some examples where millions of independent thinkers and analysts supported the things you talk about for over a decade.
- dalbasal 6y agoI get the notion, but $70bn doesn't get spent on that many things... Maybe weapons projects. Anyway... this is just not the case here. The advertisers that pour budgets into fb aren't suckers. They're highly roi-sensitive and data cognizant. All advertising fails much of the time, but when it doesn't it scales.
- Silhouette 6y agoThe advertisers that pour budgets into fb aren't suckers. They're highly roi-sensitive and data cognizant. How do you know? Facebook obviously carries ads from huge brands, but also has a very long tail of smaller businesses and other advertisers. While it's reasonable to assume that whoever is spending a few million here and there on behalf of some major retail enterprise is watching the numbers pretty closely, I see no reason to assume that a thousand small businesses who are spending a few thousand here and there are doing the same. It's also worth noting that several things Facebook has done in the past have prompted reports of Major Brand X pulling $Y million in ad spend, so apparently the people who do have the sophisticated ROI monitoring don't always like what they see.
- TimSchumann 6y agoI wonder if ‘Hyperloop the brand’ has crossed this milestone yet.
- baking 6y agoNowhere close, but you gave me a chuckle.
- aerosmile 6y agoIgnore the downvotes. dalbasal presented concrete facts and sound reasoning. Some people's dislike for Facebook as a company doesn't change the validity of his arguments.
- dalbasal 6y agodalbasal dislikes fb more than anyone. But, thinking that fb ads suck while a highly roi-motivated industry pours $70bn pa into it is ludicrous.
- nolok 6y agoYou're of course right, and I guess every sentence in that post of mine should be prefixed by "in my opinion / for my usage". I will be honest and say that the prefix was assumed to be understood without having to be written, but I understand how without it my statement could be seen as something else (and rather obviously wrong).
- dalbasal 6y agoFair enough.
- marktangotango 6y agoI read it as such and assume most reasonable people did as well. I personally think online discourse would be much less noise if the Principal of Charity were more widely applied, as opposed to wanton application of the Principal of You Are Trivially Wrong and I Will Prove It.