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I guess I'll be the contrarian here. The real customers of FB (aka advertisers) that I've asked all claim to get their money's worth from their ad spends and ob

I guess I'll be the contrarian here. The real customers of FB (aka advertisers) that I've asked all claim to get their money's worth from their ad spends and obviously they keep going back to the well rather than switching to somewhere else. Fake users and bots can't be spending fake money. So even if the claims about the raw number of users are grossly exaggerated, the performance metrics which actually matter (eg conversions per ad dollar) can't be fake. Therefore the company can't just be an elaborate scam.

jjeaff 6y ago
Many Madoff investors praised Madoff for many years for the amazing returns they received. Many of them more than doubled their investments many times over. So Madoff cannot have been a scammer.
- dternyak 6y ago
  I don't think this analogy holds. In the Madoff example, returns were quite literally only on paper, as they were fabricated out of thin air. As someone who runs ads on Facebook, I can tell you that we saw an immediate lift in revenue and profitability as soon as we started. Internally we actually believe Facebook is misattributing Facebook driven purchases to the low side, as various ad blocking tools like uBlock may be interfering with this attribution matching. For the Madoff analogy to hold, Facebook would have be going to our site and making just enough purchases to convince us to continue to run ads on Facebook. From the view of the business, I couldn't care less of how many fake accounts are on Facebook. As long as money in < money out, we're going to keep running ads on Facebook.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    They actually weren't just paper returns. Like many ponzi schemes, he used late investor money to pay returns on early investors.
    - dternyak 6y ago
      Yes, this is true in the sense that investor's did actually receive returns, but I was talking about the fund as a whole not actually generating any returns.

jjeaff 6y ago

Many Madoff investors praised Madoff for many years for the amazing returns they received. Many of them more than doubled their investments many times over. So Madoff cannot have been a scammer.

dternyak 6y ago
I don't think this analogy holds. In the Madoff example, returns were quite literally only on paper, as they were fabricated out of thin air. As someone who runs ads on Facebook, I can tell you that we saw an immediate lift in revenue and profitability as soon as we started. Internally we actually believe Facebook is misattributing Facebook driven purchases to the low side, as various ad blocking tools like uBlock may be interfering with this attribution matching. For the Madoff analogy to hold, Facebook would have be going to our site and making just enough purchases to convince us to continue to run ads on Facebook. From the view of the business, I couldn't care less of how many fake accounts are on Facebook. As long as money in < money out, we're going to keep running ads on Facebook.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  They actually weren't just paper returns. Like many ponzi schemes, he used late investor money to pay returns on early investors.
  - dternyak 6y ago
    Yes, this is true in the sense that investor's did actually receive returns, but I was talking about the fund as a whole not actually generating any returns.