27 ms·

After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

393 points by CPLX 6y ago

andrewclunn 6y ago
$60 millions for 25 million fans? Gosh that seems like an abysmal ROI, unless your levels of engagement are through the roof.
kowlo 6y ago
That is a serious amount of money. Are Facebook ads really that effective? The final paragraph makes me sad - this company is entirely at the mercy of Facebook.
- dbt00 6y ago
  > The final paragraph makes me sad - this company is entirely at the mercy of Facebook. The content is up, go read. Shared.com, fun.shared.com, see if you would ever want their headlines in your news feed.
  - martin_a 6y ago
    Yeah, really not high-quality content, I don't want to read that stuff . Nevertheless that should not be the reason to kill your accounts without any prior notice after spending 60 million in ads.
  - jyriand 6y ago
    Where there is demand, there is supply.
  - CabSauce 6y ago
    This is hopefully the answer. Hopefully facebook is trying to improve their feed. It's absolute garbage.
  - sb8244 6y ago
    I don't want to read their content, but why should I (or someone else) get to make the decision of what others choose to read? I see lots of stuff shared on Facebook that I just can't believe people are into, but they are really into it. Good for them for finding enjoyment in it. If I don't want to see that content, I can mute the person to clean up my feed. If the content doesn't violate any rules and people want to read it, then it has a place. If it does violate rules, then communicate those clearly. Given that, I think that this is most likely not an issue of rules violation but of Facebook not wanting the content on their platform (and not wanting to actually justify that).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
AlexandrB 6y ago
Another sign that several FAANGs exist as a monopoly. When you're so big that you can provide effectively no customer service to a customer spending in the 10s of millions (and they have no competitor they can go to afterwards) there's a problem.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  Facebook and google are not the only places to advertise.
  - minitoar 6y ago
    Sorta. Where else would you advertise if you’re specifically trying to reach people who are doing web searches for your product category?
    - petercooper 6y ago
      To be fair, ads on Facebook aren't generally appearing in response to searches. But there are plenty of high value lower traffic options, such as specialized blogs and newsletters that have audiences fitting your target market - you have to work to find and work with them but at a certain scale it makes sense (at "I have $57m to spend on ads" scale, potentially not).
  - simplecto 6y ago
    Please enlighten us. Porn networks do not count.
    - tiborsaas 6y ago
      I haven't spent a dime on online ads, but if it were my problem, I'd go though the top Alexa websites and see if they accept money for ads.
      - londons_explore 6y ago
        The days of that kind of thing are over. Everyone does placements using ad networks. Best you'll manage along those lines is approaching celebrities and youtube/insta stars and getting them to endorse your product.
rwdim 6y ago
Most likely, one of your competitors negotiated a deal where you were deplatformed as a condition. $57M over 13/14 years, or $100M right now... easy choice for Facebook.
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  Sounds like something that could be tortious interference but how could it ever be proven unless someone on the inside talks? The absoluteness of the communication cutoff certainly makes it seem like Facebook has something they want to ensure doesn't have any possibility of accidentally leaking.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  Is that really the most likely? I'd suggest it's much more likely that they tripped some automated spam protection or a moderator thought they looked suspicious, than there's a conspiracy against the company by a competitor. That conspiracy would be of a high reputational risk to Facebook and the competitor, and would have a paper-trail in contracts that guarantee Facebook that ad revenue for the deplatforming. It seems highly unlikely to me, as much as I believe Facebook to have poor moral standing.
  - dbt00 6y ago
    I agree. It's far more likely some of the content mill sweeps they made during the election caught them.
- jgurewitz 6y ago
  This is not likely at all.
- conanbatt 6y ago
  That is subject to a severe anti-trust litigation
sam0x17 6y ago
I seriously hope these guys get their pages re-instated. Crazy that Facebook would ban their personal accounts as well. I wonder if they have decided that the concept of "sharing" something is redundant with Facebook's own features, so they decided to wipe it out. Shame on FB. That said, I don't know of many "small businesses" that can pull $52m in ad spend, even if it's over 20 years ;)
- danpalmer 6y ago
  This stood out to me too, but that's ~$2.5m a year, and if the business is ad-arbitrage (buying FB ads to get views on ads on their own site), then I could imagine it being quite low margin, 15% margin is a ~$3m a year business, and if you're paying 5 employees, taxes, etc out of that last $500k, I can understand calling that "small".
Mountain_Skies 6y ago
Platforms like Facebook can be an avenue to a great revenue stream but we've seen time and time again they can be capricious, passive aggressive, and tone deaf. Some day all of this will catch up to them but in the meantime, being dependent on any one platform for your survival is like playing Russian Roulette with an automated gun.
ike77 6y ago
I cannot wrap my head around how that could even be possible? They mention they had FB representatives physically received at their offices. Couldn't they join those directly? I expect that if you spent 57 mio $ in any business, the minimum would be to have a direct telephone contact with a sales rep / account manager and to review the relationship quarterly.
- etskinner 6y ago
  They do say that they no longer have that avenue in the article: > I have visited their offices and have hosted their representatives at mine. I still cherish my relationships with all of them. > Over the past few years, however, the lines of communication have gone dark. Instead of our trusted Facebook partners, we found ourselves trying to communicate with 3rd party contractors who didn’t always share our goals and objectives or understand our business. There was little interest in helping us understand new Facebook policies or what we were expected to do to comply with them.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    This is not the first time I have heard something like "There was little interest in helping us understand new Facebook policies or what we were expected to do to comply with them. " This is generally said when the new policies are intentionally designed to keep out a whole niche of shady behavior, so that complying would require to abandon their core business model; i.e. it's not really expected that they would comply, the policies are explicitly written to stop doing business with them and also every future company like theirs. If they could work out something with the customer representatives to mostly keep doing what they want to do while fitting within the letter of the policy, that would just indicate a bug in the policy text that needs to be fixed.
- martin_a 6y ago
  > They mention they had FB representatives physically received at their offices. Couldn't they join those directly? Two sentences later it becomes clearly that those contacts have left or whatever and they have been since dealing with whoever was not really involved with Facebook.
kitkat_new 6y ago
fully in the hands of Facebook Absolutely deserved. I hope others use this as an opportunity to learn and not make the same mistake. (completely ignoring ads being a shady business anyways)
- hsuduebc2 6y ago
  What mistakes? Trusting Facebook?
  - yls 6y ago
    Probably also putting all eggs into one basket.
  - zentiggr 6y ago
    Yes.
- onepointsixC 6y ago
  This seems needlessly dismissive. Who do you buy ads from if not FB and Google?
logronoide 6y ago
It’s hard to understand that a business partner for 15 years and after dozens of millions of dollars spent can kick you in the @@s and ghost you without any explanation. This kind of behaviors from large corporations have to stop.
- drcongo 6y ago
  Bit of a stretch to call Facebook a "partner" to _any_ business. They're racketeers and building a business on the back of them is frankly insane.
  - logronoide 6y ago
    If you pay such a large amount of money I think “partner” should be the right word... but you are right, they don’t deserve that. May be “cannibals” is more appropriate.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- zentiggr 6y ago
  No one but Google, Apple or Amazon are remotely close to being 'partners' with Facebook. Unless you count hedge finds or multinationals in other industries. Facebook's cash flow is enough that even this company's revenue is a rounding error on _weekly_ numbers. In other words, FB don't care, don't let the door hit you. If some player has a few billion in FB revenue at stake, I'll bet they can at least reach a first tier CSR.
- ska 6y ago
  If they can ghost you this effectively, you were never a business partner. If they were an actual business partner, you could rely on the terms of the contract the two of you arrived at to define your partnership to give you recourse, assuming your lawyers were competent.
12xo 6y ago
Before you get upset, is this company actually providing any service of value to anyone but themselves or is their entire business based on arbitrage of ads from traffic they are able to siphon away and off from FB?
frouge 6y ago
Be happy they did, you can now build a better a world by stopping feeding facebook. Put your money somewhere else.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I uninstalled the app a couple weeks ago. Amazing positive difference in my mental health and focus. Now to kick my HN habit...
smoyer 6y ago
> Facebook has systematically shut down our 2 small businesses during a pandemic and economic crisis without explanation. If you've spent $57MM on Facebook ads, are you still considered a "small business"? Perhaps I'm out of touch. I think the warning about building your business on someone else's land still applies but I'm not sure how you get around that when so much of the world's attention is controlled by a few truly giant companies.
- __s 6y ago
  > I think the warning about building your business on someone else's land There aren't really any businesses which have sovereign territory
  - ffhhj 6y ago
    > There aren't really any businesses which have sovereign territory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_City
    - saotome 6y ago
      touché
  - smoyer 6y ago
    That's an interesting position (and I'm not disputing it) but if you were a business that has sovereign territory, you still need utilities (Internet). Penn State has its own data-centers, is part of the Internet2 consortium and has dedicated fiber to both AWS and Azure but you're still ultimately reliant on those you're leasing the connections from - even if you own the fiber, you're probably leasing the right-of-way/poles/etc. So ... how do we build an Internet that's fully inter-connected but can withstand actions by the few relatively large carriers? Thinking about it a bit more, isn't the effect of having a few large network providers analogous to the issue with BitCoin having a few large mining operations in effective control of the ecosystem?
    - 6y ago
dustinmoris 6y ago
I've become increasingly more skeptical when I read those stories. Let me be clear, I absolutely despise Facebook, but as I understand it, they are massively under fire from all sorts of governments over moderating the content which is posted on their platforms. There is a chance that this business knew they were doing something borderline dodgy in a grey area and Facebook started to weed those "bad" actors out in the moment of heat. I'm not implying that this is the case for sure, but it's not entirely impossible to imagine. Perhaps it's good that when governments take action and put pressure on FAANGs that they are even prepared to cancel a 57M customer if that means staying in business for themselves.
- Gunax 6y ago
  I agree that skepticism is necessary, but it's likely a lot less logical than that. They probably tripped some algorithm. This happened last year to podcast-addict (one of the most popular applications in Google's Android store) [1]. The lesson I take away is: even big players spending millions are subject to the algorithm. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427
- jonathanstrange 6y ago
  That's the really bad thing about being the victim of algorithmic discrimination (like I was too with FB ads) and quasi-monopoly abuse. There are plenty of people with similar stories like this one complaining on forums like r/PPC. Dealing with Facebook is like a bureaucratic nightmare from a Kafka story even for customers who spend millions of dollars. But of course these cases remain a minority or else Facebook would already be bankrupt. That's why the majority will call these people whiners, probably guilty, and so on. Basically, what Facebook is doing is automatized slander. You've violated some policy but we don't tell you which one. You've been caught in "suspicious behavior" (an actual term used by them) but we don't tell you what we mean by that. You've tried to circumvent our policies - or maybe you haven't, just beg us to give you another chance. Let's just say it's not fun having to deal with this, and no company should rely much on Facebook ads.
jgurewitz 6y ago
To maybe help clarify, the author mentions 57M spent over 14 years. My guess is that this was more front loaded given FB dynamics, but evenly distributed that's 300k a month, which might barely qualify you for a small business representative. The size and scale of FB are such that unless you're well over 1M a month you are a small business.
- ike77 6y ago
  It's 1/10000th of their global revenues. And 1/3000th of their US revenues. Assuming a Zipf distribution for their clients spending, it easily place them in the top 1000 biggest spenders. I wouldn't call it small.
  - jgurewitz 6y ago
    If they were spending 57M a year that would be different and they would like likely have an enterprise level team. 57M over 14 years doesn't warrant that, and in particular, I'd expect that to have been primarily in the prime years for content on FB, 09-12. Assuming an even distribution over 14 years, for FB today, spending 300k a month might warrant a rep but it's at the very bottom of tiered spend.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
Looking at shared.com content - If I was forced to guess what might justify this apart from an FB screw up, is that while no single post breaks FB rules. The quantity that they are posting now breaks a new FB policy and that shared.com is seen as producing huge quantities of low quality, click bait content that FB see as 'polluting` their platform, leeching away users/ad viewers. That is just a guess.
- cratermoon 6y ago
  I'm with others who point out that FB is already a dumpster fire of junk, so jettisoning low-quality clickbait isn't on their agenda. What I do think is on FB's agenda is producing and profiting off of low-quality clickbait directly. Thus, someone at FB could have decided the OP's business is competing with them. Even if you don't agree that FB is all about low-quality clickbait right now, it shouldn't shock anyone that FB might decide to get into that market and take steps to squash a potential competitor.
  - benlivengood 6y ago
    Who pays money to show ads on shared.com? At first glance it looks like generic adsense, probably opted in to any available ad exchanges. So presumably facebook is miffed that it pays better to take eyeballs away from their feed and point them at google ads. It does make one wonder why FB doesn't stick adsense on the feed or increase the price of their ads; clearly there's plenty of room for arbitrage.
- Raphmedia 6y ago
  > The quantity that they are posting now breaks a new FB policy Could you tell me more about that? What new policy?
  - helsinkiandrew 6y ago
    The policy I guess at in the rest of that sentence immediately after the words you quote.
mattficke 6y ago
>Freebies has been plagued by recent ad violations suggesting they are not following policy for dating ads. Freebies has never run a dating site, nor has it advertised for dating sites on Facebook. The CEO of Freebies, Mike Debutte, tried in vain to reach out to Facebook for help in appealing the supposed violations that are causing major disruptions and loss of revenue to our business. It was frustrating and handicapped the business, but it had become the cost of doing business on Facebook, so we just kept doing the best we could to continue to grow the business. Isn't this the explanation? I get that they disagree with the substance of the violations, but it doesn't sound like this came out of nowhere like the headline claims. They were repeatedly flagged for ad violations, then their pages were shut down when they ignored these as the "cost of doing business".
- bryan0 6y ago
  Yes they were kicked off for ad violations, but the violations were not explained.
- capableweb 6y ago
  I'm failing to understand how they are ignoring violations when A) they don't see which policy rules are being broken B) the rule that Facebook says been broken has norelevance to the ads they actually run and C) the CEO of Freebies tried to reach out to Facebook to clear things up.
- jbob2000 6y ago
  I looked at the shared.com website, it seems like it’s just a content farm for marketing affiliations. They were probably banned for being a source of spam, even if the dashboard says “green” (maybe there are ways to systematically game this rating, very odd the article is so hung up on this rating).
- sonotmyname 6y ago
  > Isn't this the explanation? Err, how is that an explanation? If they don't run dating ads and Facebook says their dating ads are non-compliant, it's a non-answer. It'd be like me firing you for having blue hair when you don't have blue hair.
lmilcin 6y ago
I hope you understand the fault lies completely in you. Facebook is know to do or say whatever is needed to further their business. It not a new thing, it is a pattern of deception well documented here on HN. By choosing to build your business on FB platform you should have understanding, that you are not really building your own business but rather you are building business for FB which lets you build business on their platform until such time they decide it is not worth it and kick you out. You chose an ally that has no morals and you let yourself be completely dependent on their willingness to keep you. Every business owner is responsible for thinking for themselves and investigating their partners. If this was your only partner, on which you were completely reliant for your business, it means you have catastrophically neglected your responsibility. Have you done your job you would realize that there is a risk and you would try to save or diversify in case the worst comes. Instead you were just focused on reaping benefits rather than thinking long term. Pass the message to other people as widely as possible so that public is aware of how FB conducts business so that less people will face the same tragedy in the future.
boffinism 6y ago
Lots of comments here to the effect of "shame on you for letting yourself be so dependent on them", but the awful thing is that there are so many businesses whose unit economics _only_ make sense if they can buy visitors via Facebook. They are way, way cheaper for a lot of B2C businesses than any other ad network. I don't know why. Is it because people who are browsing FB/IG are bored and actively looking for ads to click on? Either way, it sucks that no one else offers the same access and CPM/CPC etc
- zentiggr 6y ago
  Sounds like cases of 'play with fire, you're going to get burned'. If your business is dependent on FB, time to pivot. Q. E. D.
scottrogowski 6y ago
I visited "shared.com" and the content looks pretty innocuous. The first story is about office chairs, the second is about celebrity engagements. Sure, it's clickbait, but we're talking about facebook - not nature magazine. Maybe facebook changed their ad policies to prohibit this kind of content. That's within their right but they owe an explanation to their advertisers and perhaps some wind-down time. This sort of arbitrary ban-by-T&C, with no judicial oversight, is further evidence that Facebook, and likely all large tech companies, are abusing their monopoly power and need significantly more regulation.
blantonl 6y ago
Let's be fair here. Shared.com is in the business of producing and distributing crap content. That's a subjective term, but it's like the supreme court ruling on pornography, you'll know it when you see it. These guys most likely "skirt the line" to just operate as a mediocre and crappy content distribution network, that at scale, makes a lot of money because there is a certain subset of the population that will eat up any content at any quality level. Facebook decided they don't want to be a part of this type of content distribution, and they made a conscious business decision to not to engage with it's owners and operators because it will simply result in an exercise of splitting hairs and a reduction to the ridiculous. They just aren't going to bring themselves down to the level... and I don't blame them.
- h43k3r 6y ago
  You are right about content. But in that case FB should have clearly communicated about violations for those pages and given a chance to correct them. Also taking down personal accounts seems more like an automated action where a graph of related accounts are taken down.
  - SilasX 6y ago
    It's not even about violations (which there may not have been), just some kind of explanation. "Hey we don't want to be involved in this kind of content, we're making a judgment call to disallow it."
    - blantonl 6y ago
      With regards to this, my point was that Facebook doesn't want to get into a long drawn out discussion with whataboutisms and splitting hairs on policy. They made a business decision to move on from this content platform. I love to hate on facebook with the best of them, but they really don't "owe" anyone anything. There seems to be this pervasive attitude in technology circles that platforms "owe" other businesses and individuals something when they build businesses on top of said platforms. Just because you spent 54MM in ads on a platform doesn't entitle you to anything when a legal or business decision has to be made. Is it crappy not to communicate and give an explanation...? you bet it is. Did that 54MM in spend generate anything for Shared... you bet it did. Everyone was a winner until Facebook moved on. I suspect that Facebook and Shared working to negotiate out of this will just result in a lot of spinning wheels, ammunition collection on both sides to pursue legal remedies, and nothing of real value changing. Facebook said we're moving on. Done.
TLightful 6y ago
Facebook mafia does what now?
eb0la 6y ago
IMHO FB ads a a pile of #@! In my experience, a message sent to the appropiate FB group can outperform by a factor of 10 facebok ads. Not just clickthroughs, but also repeated visits after 2 weeks. If you buy traffic from a specific country, they will send you from whenever else* while they charge you for geolocated traffic. Sad thing IP addresses are easy to geolocate this days and they miserably fail to do it. I wonder how they work with stuff you cannot compare like similar audiences..
phendrenad2 6y ago
Probably got mistaken for misleading political content. If you search for `"shared.com" "trump"` or `"shared.com" "biden"` there are some pretty tabloid-tier conspiracy articles.
- aaron695 6y ago
  CBD maybe? cbd site:shared.com
- XargonEnder 6y ago
  Can confirm, I just did these searches
string 6y ago
A business that creates garbage content with a business model that almost exclusively relies on another garbage company's ad platform. I have very little sympathy for companies that run ads in the first place. This just seems like good news to me.
- sto_hristo 6y ago
  The bigger picture is that it can be anyone's business - even the most "pristine" one. Getting banned without any notice when you run a business is just low and pathetic.
  - string 6y ago
    I agree that banning people from platforms for no reason isn't cool. But what do people honestly expect from Facebook? Running ads in the first place is contemptible. Basing basically your entire business model on running Facebook ads is stupid in the extreme. If you're greedy enough to run your business like that, you reap what you sow.
jjd33 6y ago
I had a look at what shared.com is. I salute Facebook for banning you and wish for the entire world to permaban you.
steeleyespan 6y ago
Much smaller scale, but I got kicked off Adsense after running for over 10 years. No guidance, no feedback, etc. Even our direct Adsense rep said she had no input with the policy teams. They kept about 1.5mm in revenue. It is hard being wholly dependent on a large company (Google, Facebook, etc.), but not much choice you have either when riding that wave on their product.
tssva 6y ago
For all those doing math and commenting regarding Facebook revenues vs this ad spend while you do your math keep in mind that Facebook revenues are reported in US dollars and the $57M mentioned in this article is Canadian dollars.
ppeetteerr 6y ago
A pattern that I see with tech companies like these is poor communication about features and decisions made within the company. Price changes and policy changes, understandably, are made quickly and following rules. What about when the UI changes, or when a policy change affects how a user can behave? That's probably either not communicated at all or hidden in the many, many pages of the T&Cs.
havkom 6y ago
I’m glad that FB treats everyone equally.
chimen 6y ago
Boy that "Emma C" author sure knows everything about anything. This is the lowest form of shallow content that receives millions of dollars to be in front, surpassing good stories by authors with notoriety on the subject. Facebook is the place where some of my "acquaintances" learned that Bill Gates gives them COVID, that everything is a conspiracy designed to take something from them, that the vaccine will implant them nano-chips or 5G "reactions" and sleeper nano-whatever that will wake-up on the right frequency. I hate that platform because it gives a big mouth to everyone, to the bad apple that can now infect the rest over the internet. One look at shared.com homepage and I knew...I couldn't be bothered with their story.
throwaway99x99 6y ago
"Facebook had taken action against me, personally, that one assumes are reserved for the worst in our society — criminals, pedophiles and conspiracy theorists." Yah, it's those conspiracy theorists that are the worst in society.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  Cult-like conspiracies like the QAnon stuff are not harmless. Comparing them to criminals is warranted, at least after the incident where one of them attempted a mass shooting. But still that quoted sentence is quite weird. Banning someone from an online platform is the standard procedure for policy violations, not just for the "worst in our society" no matter how you define those.
- kurtschwanda 6y ago
  I've been in therapy for years after my uncle tried to convince me the mob killed JFK.
jaywalk 6y ago
> Facebook had taken action against me, personally, that one assumes are reserved for the worst in our society — criminals, pedophiles and conspiracy theorists. Lumping in conspiracy theorists with pedophiles? This guy is an ass, his business was probably barely legitimate, and I don't feel sorry for him in the slightest.
- 55555 6y ago
  I read this as a tongue-in-cheek joke.
- sto_hristo 6y ago
  Different outlets for different kinds of mental illnesses. There aren't really any levels to being disgusting. Once you hit that definition, you end up alongside with everything out there that fits it. Spreading hate, lies, paranoia, disinformation, your personal delusions is disgusting as is pedophilia.
  - KirillPanov 6y ago
    This kind of intolerance is disgusting to me.
drno123 6y ago
The author of the article equates conspiracy theorists to pedophiles.
- santoshalper 6y ago
  I don't think he was making a value judgment. These are just groups of people Facebook is actively trying to keep off their site. His point is that his companies aren't part of those groups. Based on quick (not even remotely thorough) look at shared.com, I tend to agree. It's just a bunch of buzzfeed-level listicles, but I didn't find anything scammy or harmful. Perhaps Facebook is trying to raise the "quality" of what is shared on their platform (not just the ethics), but if that is the case I haven't heard anything about it. Facebook is absolutely stuffed to the gills with this kind of commodity-grade filler content. Based on what he posted, my guess is that the author delegated too much editorial control in his mini media empire and one of the sites in his network published some pretty objectionable content. If I were a betting man, I'd say it was COVID/vaccine related.
stevespang 6y ago
Dig deeper, the reason Facebook nixed you is that Zuck is going to reproduce your content, copycat you, and wipe you out. Apple is nixing Facebooks ecosystem from preying on Apple customers data, and the Zuck whines loud and clear with full page ads in major newspapers. Welcome to 2121.
tomaszs 6y ago
Over years of being a CEO of social media agency I have heard about a lot of such situations. Also we were helping small businesses that was harmed by Facebook actions. Sometimes it was possible to fix it, sometimes not. In this particular case I strongly believe the platform developed was competing with Facebook and it may be the cause Facebook shut it down. It is my personal opinion however and may be not true. But all of my experience and knowledge tells me so. There might be that public pressure will force Facebook to reenable the business and I hope it will happen. However there are a lot of businesses that was shut down and died because there they wasn't able to put a pressure on Facebook. It is the main reason why Facebook in particular should be prevented from making more harm, and we should all do everything what is possible to not be dependant on 3rd party companies.
beshrkayali 6y ago
This reads like an outcry from a wolf in sheep's clothing. I see this as a good sign. I haven't used Facebook in over 6 years and don't intend to. Everything Facebook is piholed on my network. But I'm glad they're starting to kick out trash content producers. And yeah, like others have said, if you spend ~$60M on Facebook ads (among others), I don't think you can call yourself a small business. This is like those 6 year old companies that still consider themselves startups. If you make enough revenue from content farms to spend that much on ads AND getting kicked off of Facebook jeopardizes your "business" that much, I'm gonna assume you engage in some dark patterns to collect/sell data of your visitors, or to place ads in shady ways, or some form of SEO pollution. At the very least, you run native ads disguised as content. I wouldn't want to have any business with you either.
gadders 6y ago
From the article: >>In total, several pages that had 21 million fans had been unpublished, and Facebook had taken action against me, personally, that one assumes are reserved for the worst in our society — criminals, pedophiles and conspiracy theorists. Er, no. Just be slightly more right-wing that the current Facebook overton window and you'll get banned.
markvdb 6y ago
> If given the chance, I would go to great lengths to adjust my business, to right whatever wrong Facebook believes I have committed. I would change my business model, and shift the direction of my business to ensure I am fully compliant with Facebook’s policies. I have done it many times before. I would like to do it again. This is a reminder Facebook is too powerful.
- agilob 6y ago
  >e, I would go to great lengths to adjust my business, to right whatever wrong Facebook believes I have committed Also a reminder not to base your business on a functionality of a monster.
xwdv 6y ago
Before anyone gets too impressed (though I may be too late judging by the chorus that has formed), it's $57M CAD, and over the course of 14 years, so roughly about $3.2M USD in spending per year, or roughly $266k USD per month. Fairly typical customer.
zentiggr 6y ago
Sounds to me like this should be the zillionth warning sign that leaning on a FAANG for any significant portion of your business activities is a critical mistake. If there is no customer support, there is no reliability, period. You can delude yourself into thinking you have a resource, when what you have is a niche in somebody else's place. Of course this will throw his business into chaos. Time to sue Facebook for unfair business practices. Or if that's not allowed under the TOS, walk away and find the next path. Every story I hear paints another stroke of the picture of Facebook turning into a cesspool of AI-controlled careless swamp of attention-grabbing, only mitigated by reporting on their most callous bullshit.
- mr_toad 6y ago
  Lumping all the FAANG companies, or even parts of these large companies together like this is just lazy. Netflix is unreliable and has no customer support? Are iPhones unreliable? Should business not rely on AWS? HN deserves better than sweeping generalisations and shallow black and white polemics.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
flatus 6y ago
Watch whether Facebook (or a partner) duplicates Shared.com's content. This may be a very clear example of monopoly behavior.
otterley 6y ago
And nothing of value was lost.
Justin_K 6y ago
This won't be a popular comment but if your entire business model is based upon the existence of FB, you should have had a formal contract in place, as well as dedicated points of contact. I can't imagine that someone with millions in annual spend couldn't require this of FB.
richy_ 6y ago
shared.com is in the business of click arbitrage. Paying for cheap clicks on one publisher to drive clicks with another.
dmje 6y ago
Trying hard to empathise with company spending $57m on ads. Failing.
DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
I wonder if this is an opportunity for business insurance. I.e., being shunned by Facebook or Google is a high-consequence, low-probability, hard-to-predict event. You may as well treat it like building a factory in an earthquake zone.
- jjk166 6y ago
  Step 1: Make something that is right on the edge of being acceptable according to facebook's T&C Step 2: Take out $10 Million Policy Step 3: Have your buddy at facebook flag your content Step 4: Split money with buddy from facebook
picodguyo 6y ago
I'm surprised by all the comments blaming the author here. Even if their content is garbage, they made foolish business decisions, yadda yadda, Facebook's policy of banning business accounts and all associated personal accounts with no explanation or recourse should not be allowed legally.
X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
Lots of comments on here about whether it is good or bad to kick this particular company off the platform. Regardless of if the overall decision is good or bad, how FB goes about it, including messaging and forewarning is something that there is no excuse to not get right. Saying look at our ToS is absurd.
rajacombinator 6y ago
I totally believe their story. I got algo banned before running a single ad for an app that Apple approved. (Higher bar than FB.) Stonewalled on appeal. Makes no sense.
Krisjohn 6y ago
The thing about a gold rush is that you never know when your claim will dry up. By all means, take advantage of FB, but prepare for the day it ends.
WheelsAtLarge 6y ago
This should serve as a warning to all business owners. Relying on any one channel for your business can be very risky as we can see with the problems this business is having. I don't know if Facebook is right or wrong here but the big internet companies are big enough now that they need an independent review board for cases like this. Yet, we hear rumblings of it happening but it has not. I wonder what it will take for that to happen?
eirikurh 6y ago
Speculation: Could there be a connection to something similar to yesterday's story about Uber being defrauded? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858)
reilly3000 6y ago
Saying no to content arbitrage ads is something I can get behind!
ordu 6y ago
> If given the chance, I would go to great lengths to adjust my business, to right whatever wrong Facebook believes I have committed. I would change my business model, and shift the direction of my business to ensure I am fully compliant with Facebook’s policies. I have done it many times before. I would like to do it again. 15 years ago or so I happened to become a moderator on forum for script kiddies. I had been a temporal appointment for a month, because of another anecdotal funny story, but what I've found while being a moderator, that all those script kiddies trying to sell some stolen data were open for a discussion of their behaviour. In a good way open. Before me (and by the way after me, and even with me) the forum was a mess. A great heap of kids trying to outcry others with their offers to find a buyer for their crap. There were strictly sounding rules, like "do not post into your forum topic (to get it on top of others) more than once per day", which were violated frequently. The approach of a moderator before me was to temporarily ban anyone he caught crossing the line. I was the reason of my temporary assignment to this forum, and I tried to do the best I could. So I started to take notes, and I talked to people, explaining them what they did wrong, and what consequences they would face when I'll run out of time to talk with them. It worked like a charm, they were ready to conform to the rules, conditionally on the rules for everyone not just them. I used banning as a way to affect behaviour, but mostly short-term bans, no more than a day long, just to make sure they noticed me and to give them a feeling that they were punished enough and all their guilt is in the past redeemed and forgotten. (The guy before me could kind of dug up some half-a-year old violation and use it as an official reason for ban, while the real reason was violation of a pecking order, with him on the top). I had learned a lot from that. From the other hand I have been never worked for 12+ hours a day for a month without days off. It was exhausting. If I had some tools for automation it would be easier, but I never got time to write the tools I needed. I know that Facebook is a lot of orders of magnitude bigger then my problem was, so I'd likely be mistaken if tried to extrapolate, but nevertheless, my guess is Facebook have run out of resources to manage that mess and is trying to shrink it.
bilekas 6y ago
Shared.com has the headlines that are extremely simular to the fake add headlines you see. If I was to implement some automation to kick of agressive spammers, it would not be too hard for Shared's content to get mixed into that pile. Given how much you have to spend on Facebook ads to still generate views. I wont be losing sleep over it. Maybe its a sign to move on to more productive things.
itisit 6y ago
These so called "content recommendation engines" pollute the web with low-effort, low-quality garbage writing that hooks less discriminating users while collecting reams of data to improve ad targeting. Good riddance, I say.
rmason 6y ago
Is it at all normal to be spending millions of dollars a year at Facebook and not have a dedicated account rep? Apparently not and that boggles the mind.
ykevinator 6y ago
Shared seems a little scammy
jolincost 6y ago
This probably had nothing to do with FB proper as is simply a form of state or corporate sponsored https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung This guy or someone in his business or personal circle has caused problems for someone and they've leant on him. Around 20% of all deplatforming originates with these covert coerce requests from states or big corporate
walrus01 6y ago
This immediately set off my bullshit detector: >Our legacy promotional business, Freebies (freebies.com, free.ca), publishes notices of free samples, savings and coupons from great brands. The majority of our expenditure on Facebook is through Freebies. Translation: Promoted marketing content and clickbait sites of very little actual content value. I'm absolutely unsurprised FB banned them.
chx 6y ago
> Our legacy promotional business, Freebies (freebies.com, free.ca), publishes notices of free samples A vast amount of free samples are actually review scams. You buy the thing from Amazon, they refund you so you appear as a verified purchase and then you write a 'honest' review. I regularly report these when I see them, I presume others too, if they got involved in this sort of thing, then a ban is right.
calimac 6y ago
Facebook should be deleted.
croes 6y ago
"for safety and security reasons, we can’t give you any additional information as to why your account was disabled" that is the creepy part. We ban you but we don't tell you why.
vfclists 6y ago
A lot of the commenters are ignored the major point here. "Facebook have given them no explanation on how their content violates their guidelines" Facebook has been happy to take their money all these years, now all of a sudden they are bad guys. At the very least Facebook owes them a better explanation.
tyrex2017 6y ago
One possible explanation: Facebook knows the business violates its rules, but it cant share details, as they were obtained illegally (eg violating privacy rights)..
rkagerer 6y ago
Like the author, I built my first business on someone else's platform. It was a great niche, but eventually you hit a ceiling and run into impediments stemming from their business decisions - over which you have no control. The author seems fully aware of his situation. I hope he at least gets some explanation, but this goes to show there's no substitute for forging a trench of independence around your business model (at least where it makes sense) and growing your own ecosystem (certainly not an easy task, of course).
izzytcp 6y ago
Well well well. Junkies banning junkies. I love it.
KirillPanov 6y ago
We’ve determined that you are not eligible to use Facebook. For safety and security reasons, we can’t give you any additional information as to why your account was disabled. As someone who has never had a facebook account, I am more confused than ever about why people want anything to do with it.

393 points by CPLX 6y ago

$60 millions for 25 million fans? Gosh that seems like an abysmal ROI, unless your levels of engagement are through the roof.

kowlo 6y ago

That is a serious amount of money. Are Facebook ads really that effective? The final paragraph makes me sad - this company is entirely at the mercy of Facebook.

dbt00 6y ago
> The final paragraph makes me sad - this company is entirely at the mercy of Facebook. The content is up, go read. Shared.com, fun.shared.com, see if you would ever want their headlines in your news feed.
- martin_a 6y ago
  Yeah, really not high-quality content, I don't want to read that stuff . Nevertheless that should not be the reason to kill your accounts without any prior notice after spending 60 million in ads.
- jyriand 6y ago
  Where there is demand, there is supply.
- CabSauce 6y ago
  This is hopefully the answer. Hopefully facebook is trying to improve their feed. It's absolute garbage.
- sb8244 6y ago
  I don't want to read their content, but why should I (or someone else) get to make the decision of what others choose to read? I see lots of stuff shared on Facebook that I just can't believe people are into, but they are really into it. Good for them for finding enjoyment in it. If I don't want to see that content, I can mute the person to clean up my feed. If the content doesn't violate any rules and people want to read it, then it has a place. If it does violate rules, then communicate those clearly. Given that, I think that this is most likely not an issue of rules violation but of Facebook not wanting the content on their platform (and not wanting to actually justify that).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

AlexandrB 6y ago

Another sign that several FAANGs exist as a monopoly. When you're so big that you can provide effectively no customer service to a customer spending in the 10s of millions (and they have no competitor they can go to afterwards) there's a problem.

missedthecue 6y ago
Facebook and google are not the only places to advertise.
- minitoar 6y ago
  Sorta. Where else would you advertise if you’re specifically trying to reach people who are doing web searches for your product category?
  - petercooper 6y ago
    To be fair, ads on Facebook aren't generally appearing in response to searches. But there are plenty of high value lower traffic options, such as specialized blogs and newsletters that have audiences fitting your target market - you have to work to find and work with them but at a certain scale it makes sense (at "I have $57m to spend on ads" scale, potentially not).
- simplecto 6y ago
  Please enlighten us. Porn networks do not count.
  - tiborsaas 6y ago
    I haven't spent a dime on online ads, but if it were my problem, I'd go though the top Alexa websites and see if they accept money for ads.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      The days of that kind of thing are over. Everyone does placements using ad networks. Best you'll manage along those lines is approaching celebrities and youtube/insta stars and getting them to endorse your product.

rwdim 6y ago

Most likely, one of your competitors negotiated a deal where you were deplatformed as a condition. $57M over 13/14 years, or $100M right now... easy choice for Facebook.

Mountain_Skies 6y ago
Sounds like something that could be tortious interference but how could it ever be proven unless someone on the inside talks? The absoluteness of the communication cutoff certainly makes it seem like Facebook has something they want to ensure doesn't have any possibility of accidentally leaking.
danpalmer 6y ago
Is that really the most likely? I'd suggest it's much more likely that they tripped some automated spam protection or a moderator thought they looked suspicious, than there's a conspiracy against the company by a competitor. That conspiracy would be of a high reputational risk to Facebook and the competitor, and would have a paper-trail in contracts that guarantee Facebook that ad revenue for the deplatforming. It seems highly unlikely to me, as much as I believe Facebook to have poor moral standing.
- dbt00 6y ago
  I agree. It's far more likely some of the content mill sweeps they made during the election caught them.
jgurewitz 6y ago
This is not likely at all.
conanbatt 6y ago
That is subject to a severe anti-trust litigation

sam0x17 6y ago

I seriously hope these guys get their pages re-instated. Crazy that Facebook would ban their personal accounts as well. I wonder if they have decided that the concept of "sharing" something is redundant with Facebook's own features, so they decided to wipe it out. Shame on FB. That said, I don't know of many "small businesses" that can pull $52m in ad spend, even if it's over 20 years ;)

danpalmer 6y ago
This stood out to me too, but that's ~$2.5m a year, and if the business is ad-arbitrage (buying FB ads to get views on ads on their own site), then I could imagine it being quite low margin, 15% margin is a ~$3m a year business, and if you're paying 5 employees, taxes, etc out of that last $500k, I can understand calling that "small".

Mountain_Skies 6y ago

Platforms like Facebook can be an avenue to a great revenue stream but we've seen time and time again they can be capricious, passive aggressive, and tone deaf. Some day all of this will catch up to them but in the meantime, being dependent on any one platform for your survival is like playing Russian Roulette with an automated gun.

ike77 6y ago

I cannot wrap my head around how that could even be possible? They mention they had FB representatives physically received at their offices. Couldn't they join those directly? I expect that if you spent 57 mio $ in any business, the minimum would be to have a direct telephone contact with a sales rep / account manager and to review the relationship quarterly.

etskinner 6y ago
They do say that they no longer have that avenue in the article: > I have visited their offices and have hosted their representatives at mine. I still cherish my relationships with all of them. > Over the past few years, however, the lines of communication have gone dark. Instead of our trusted Facebook partners, we found ourselves trying to communicate with 3rd party contractors who didn’t always share our goals and objectives or understand our business. There was little interest in helping us understand new Facebook policies or what we were expected to do to comply with them.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  This is not the first time I have heard something like "There was little interest in helping us understand new Facebook policies or what we were expected to do to comply with them. " This is generally said when the new policies are intentionally designed to keep out a whole niche of shady behavior, so that complying would require to abandon their core business model; i.e. it's not really expected that they would comply, the policies are explicitly written to stop doing business with them and also every future company like theirs. If they could work out something with the customer representatives to mostly keep doing what they want to do while fitting within the letter of the policy, that would just indicate a bug in the policy text that needs to be fixed.
martin_a 6y ago
> They mention they had FB representatives physically received at their offices. Couldn't they join those directly? Two sentences later it becomes clearly that those contacts have left or whatever and they have been since dealing with whoever was not really involved with Facebook.

kitkat_new 6y ago

fully in the hands of Facebook Absolutely deserved. I hope others use this as an opportunity to learn and not make the same mistake. (completely ignoring ads being a shady business anyways)

hsuduebc2 6y ago
What mistakes? Trusting Facebook?
- yls 6y ago
  Probably also putting all eggs into one basket.
- zentiggr 6y ago
  Yes.
onepointsixC 6y ago
This seems needlessly dismissive. Who do you buy ads from if not FB and Google?

logronoide 6y ago

It’s hard to understand that a business partner for 15 years and after dozens of millions of dollars spent can kick you in the @@s and ghost you without any explanation. This kind of behaviors from large corporations have to stop.

drcongo 6y ago
Bit of a stretch to call Facebook a "partner" to _any_ business. They're racketeers and building a business on the back of them is frankly insane.
- logronoide 6y ago
  If you pay such a large amount of money I think “partner” should be the right word... but you are right, they don’t deserve that. May be “cannibals” is more appropriate.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
zentiggr 6y ago
No one but Google, Apple or Amazon are remotely close to being 'partners' with Facebook. Unless you count hedge finds or multinationals in other industries. Facebook's cash flow is enough that even this company's revenue is a rounding error on _weekly_ numbers. In other words, FB don't care, don't let the door hit you. If some player has a few billion in FB revenue at stake, I'll bet they can at least reach a first tier CSR.
ska 6y ago
If they can ghost you this effectively, you were never a business partner. If they were an actual business partner, you could rely on the terms of the contract the two of you arrived at to define your partnership to give you recourse, assuming your lawyers were competent.

12xo 6y ago

Before you get upset, is this company actually providing any service of value to anyone but themselves or is their entire business based on arbitrage of ads from traffic they are able to siphon away and off from FB?

frouge 6y ago

Be happy they did, you can now build a better a world by stopping feeding facebook. Put your money somewhere else.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
I uninstalled the app a couple weeks ago. Amazing positive difference in my mental health and focus. Now to kick my HN habit...

smoyer 6y ago

> Facebook has systematically shut down our 2 small businesses during a pandemic and economic crisis without explanation. If you've spent $57MM on Facebook ads, are you still considered a "small business"? Perhaps I'm out of touch. I think the warning about building your business on someone else's land still applies but I'm not sure how you get around that when so much of the world's attention is controlled by a few truly giant companies.

__s 6y ago
> I think the warning about building your business on someone else's land There aren't really any businesses which have sovereign territory
- ffhhj 6y ago
  > There aren't really any businesses which have sovereign territory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_City
  - saotome 6y ago
    touché
- smoyer 6y ago
  That's an interesting position (and I'm not disputing it) but if you were a business that has sovereign territory, you still need utilities (Internet). Penn State has its own data-centers, is part of the Internet2 consortium and has dedicated fiber to both AWS and Azure but you're still ultimately reliant on those you're leasing the connections from - even if you own the fiber, you're probably leasing the right-of-way/poles/etc. So ... how do we build an Internet that's fully inter-connected but can withstand actions by the few relatively large carriers? Thinking about it a bit more, isn't the effect of having a few large network providers analogous to the issue with BitCoin having a few large mining operations in effective control of the ecosystem?
  - 6y ago

dustinmoris 6y ago

I've become increasingly more skeptical when I read those stories. Let me be clear, I absolutely despise Facebook, but as I understand it, they are massively under fire from all sorts of governments over moderating the content which is posted on their platforms. There is a chance that this business knew they were doing something borderline dodgy in a grey area and Facebook started to weed those "bad" actors out in the moment of heat. I'm not implying that this is the case for sure, but it's not entirely impossible to imagine. Perhaps it's good that when governments take action and put pressure on FAANGs that they are even prepared to cancel a 57M customer if that means staying in business for themselves.

Gunax 6y ago
I agree that skepticism is necessary, but it's likely a lot less logical than that. They probably tripped some algorithm. This happened last year to podcast-addict (one of the most popular applications in Google's Android store) [1]. The lesson I take away is: even big players spending millions are subject to the algorithm. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427
jonathanstrange 6y ago
That's the really bad thing about being the victim of algorithmic discrimination (like I was too with FB ads) and quasi-monopoly abuse. There are plenty of people with similar stories like this one complaining on forums like r/PPC. Dealing with Facebook is like a bureaucratic nightmare from a Kafka story even for customers who spend millions of dollars. But of course these cases remain a minority or else Facebook would already be bankrupt. That's why the majority will call these people whiners, probably guilty, and so on. Basically, what Facebook is doing is automatized slander. You've violated some policy but we don't tell you which one. You've been caught in "suspicious behavior" (an actual term used by them) but we don't tell you what we mean by that. You've tried to circumvent our policies - or maybe you haven't, just beg us to give you another chance. Let's just say it's not fun having to deal with this, and no company should rely much on Facebook ads.

jgurewitz 6y ago

To maybe help clarify, the author mentions 57M spent over 14 years. My guess is that this was more front loaded given FB dynamics, but evenly distributed that's 300k a month, which might barely qualify you for a small business representative. The size and scale of FB are such that unless you're well over 1M a month you are a small business.

ike77 6y ago
It's 1/10000th of their global revenues. And 1/3000th of their US revenues. Assuming a Zipf distribution for their clients spending, it easily place them in the top 1000 biggest spenders. I wouldn't call it small.
- jgurewitz 6y ago
  If they were spending 57M a year that would be different and they would like likely have an enterprise level team. 57M over 14 years doesn't warrant that, and in particular, I'd expect that to have been primarily in the prime years for content on FB, 09-12. Assuming an even distribution over 14 years, for FB today, spending 300k a month might warrant a rep but it's at the very bottom of tiered spend.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

Looking at shared.com content - If I was forced to guess what might justify this apart from an FB screw up, is that while no single post breaks FB rules. The quantity that they are posting now breaks a new FB policy and that shared.com is seen as producing huge quantities of low quality, click bait content that FB see as 'polluting` their platform, leeching away users/ad viewers. That is just a guess.

cratermoon 6y ago
I'm with others who point out that FB is already a dumpster fire of junk, so jettisoning low-quality clickbait isn't on their agenda. What I do think is on FB's agenda is producing and profiting off of low-quality clickbait directly. Thus, someone at FB could have decided the OP's business is competing with them. Even if you don't agree that FB is all about low-quality clickbait right now, it shouldn't shock anyone that FB might decide to get into that market and take steps to squash a potential competitor.
- benlivengood 6y ago
  Who pays money to show ads on shared.com? At first glance it looks like generic adsense, probably opted in to any available ad exchanges. So presumably facebook is miffed that it pays better to take eyeballs away from their feed and point them at google ads. It does make one wonder why FB doesn't stick adsense on the feed or increase the price of their ads; clearly there's plenty of room for arbitrage.
Raphmedia 6y ago
> The quantity that they are posting now breaks a new FB policy Could you tell me more about that? What new policy?
- helsinkiandrew 6y ago
  The policy I guess at in the rest of that sentence immediately after the words you quote.

mattficke 6y ago

>Freebies has been plagued by recent ad violations suggesting they are not following policy for dating ads. Freebies has never run a dating site, nor has it advertised for dating sites on Facebook. The CEO of Freebies, Mike Debutte, tried in vain to reach out to Facebook for help in appealing the supposed violations that are causing major disruptions and loss of revenue to our business. It was frustrating and handicapped the business, but it had become the cost of doing business on Facebook, so we just kept doing the best we could to continue to grow the business. Isn't this the explanation? I get that they disagree with the substance of the violations, but it doesn't sound like this came out of nowhere like the headline claims. They were repeatedly flagged for ad violations, then their pages were shut down when they ignored these as the "cost of doing business".

bryan0 6y ago
Yes they were kicked off for ad violations, but the violations were not explained.
capableweb 6y ago
I'm failing to understand how they are ignoring violations when A) they don't see which policy rules are being broken B) the rule that Facebook says been broken has norelevance to the ads they actually run and C) the CEO of Freebies tried to reach out to Facebook to clear things up.
jbob2000 6y ago
I looked at the shared.com website, it seems like it’s just a content farm for marketing affiliations. They were probably banned for being a source of spam, even if the dashboard says “green” (maybe there are ways to systematically game this rating, very odd the article is so hung up on this rating).
sonotmyname 6y ago
> Isn't this the explanation? Err, how is that an explanation? If they don't run dating ads and Facebook says their dating ads are non-compliant, it's a non-answer. It'd be like me firing you for having blue hair when you don't have blue hair.

lmilcin 6y ago

I hope you understand the fault lies completely in you. Facebook is know to do or say whatever is needed to further their business. It not a new thing, it is a pattern of deception well documented here on HN. By choosing to build your business on FB platform you should have understanding, that you are not really building your own business but rather you are building business for FB which lets you build business on their platform until such time they decide it is not worth it and kick you out. You chose an ally that has no morals and you let yourself be completely dependent on their willingness to keep you. Every business owner is responsible for thinking for themselves and investigating their partners. If this was your only partner, on which you were completely reliant for your business, it means you have catastrophically neglected your responsibility. Have you done your job you would realize that there is a risk and you would try to save or diversify in case the worst comes. Instead you were just focused on reaping benefits rather than thinking long term. Pass the message to other people as widely as possible so that public is aware of how FB conducts business so that less people will face the same tragedy in the future.

boffinism 6y ago

Lots of comments here to the effect of "shame on you for letting yourself be so dependent on them", but the awful thing is that there are so many businesses whose unit economics _only_ make sense if they can buy visitors via Facebook. They are way, way cheaper for a lot of B2C businesses than any other ad network. I don't know why. Is it because people who are browsing FB/IG are bored and actively looking for ads to click on? Either way, it sucks that no one else offers the same access and CPM/CPC etc

zentiggr 6y ago
Sounds like cases of 'play with fire, you're going to get burned'. If your business is dependent on FB, time to pivot. Q. E. D.

scottrogowski 6y ago

I visited "shared.com" and the content looks pretty innocuous. The first story is about office chairs, the second is about celebrity engagements. Sure, it's clickbait, but we're talking about facebook - not nature magazine. Maybe facebook changed their ad policies to prohibit this kind of content. That's within their right but they owe an explanation to their advertisers and perhaps some wind-down time. This sort of arbitrary ban-by-T&C, with no judicial oversight, is further evidence that Facebook, and likely all large tech companies, are abusing their monopoly power and need significantly more regulation.

blantonl 6y ago

Let's be fair here. Shared.com is in the business of producing and distributing crap content. That's a subjective term, but it's like the supreme court ruling on pornography, you'll know it when you see it. These guys most likely "skirt the line" to just operate as a mediocre and crappy content distribution network, that at scale, makes a lot of money because there is a certain subset of the population that will eat up any content at any quality level. Facebook decided they don't want to be a part of this type of content distribution, and they made a conscious business decision to not to engage with it's owners and operators because it will simply result in an exercise of splitting hairs and a reduction to the ridiculous. They just aren't going to bring themselves down to the level... and I don't blame them.

h43k3r 6y ago
You are right about content. But in that case FB should have clearly communicated about violations for those pages and given a chance to correct them. Also taking down personal accounts seems more like an automated action where a graph of related accounts are taken down.
- SilasX 6y ago
  It's not even about violations (which there may not have been), just some kind of explanation. "Hey we don't want to be involved in this kind of content, we're making a judgment call to disallow it."
  - blantonl 6y ago
    With regards to this, my point was that Facebook doesn't want to get into a long drawn out discussion with whataboutisms and splitting hairs on policy. They made a business decision to move on from this content platform. I love to hate on facebook with the best of them, but they really don't "owe" anyone anything. There seems to be this pervasive attitude in technology circles that platforms "owe" other businesses and individuals something when they build businesses on top of said platforms. Just because you spent 54MM in ads on a platform doesn't entitle you to anything when a legal or business decision has to be made. Is it crappy not to communicate and give an explanation...? you bet it is. Did that 54MM in spend generate anything for Shared... you bet it did. Everyone was a winner until Facebook moved on. I suspect that Facebook and Shared working to negotiate out of this will just result in a lot of spinning wheels, ammunition collection on both sides to pursue legal remedies, and nothing of real value changing. Facebook said we're moving on. Done.

TLightful 6y ago

Facebook mafia does what now?

eb0la 6y ago

IMHO FB ads a a pile of #@! In my experience, a message sent to the appropiate FB group can outperform by a factor of 10 facebok ads. Not just clickthroughs, but also repeated visits after 2 weeks. If you buy traffic from a specific country, they will send you from whenever else* while they charge you for geolocated traffic. Sad thing IP addresses are easy to geolocate this days and they miserably fail to do it. I wonder how they work with stuff you cannot compare like similar audiences..

phendrenad2 6y ago

Probably got mistaken for misleading political content. If you search for `"shared.com" "trump"` or `"shared.com" "biden"` there are some pretty tabloid-tier conspiracy articles.

aaron695 6y ago
CBD maybe? cbd site:shared.com
XargonEnder 6y ago
Can confirm, I just did these searches

string 6y ago

A business that creates garbage content with a business model that almost exclusively relies on another garbage company's ad platform. I have very little sympathy for companies that run ads in the first place. This just seems like good news to me.

sto_hristo 6y ago
The bigger picture is that it can be anyone's business - even the most "pristine" one. Getting banned without any notice when you run a business is just low and pathetic.
- string 6y ago
  I agree that banning people from platforms for no reason isn't cool. But what do people honestly expect from Facebook? Running ads in the first place is contemptible. Basing basically your entire business model on running Facebook ads is stupid in the extreme. If you're greedy enough to run your business like that, you reap what you sow.

jjd33 6y ago

I had a look at what shared.com is. I salute Facebook for banning you and wish for the entire world to permaban you.

steeleyespan 6y ago

Much smaller scale, but I got kicked off Adsense after running for over 10 years. No guidance, no feedback, etc. Even our direct Adsense rep said she had no input with the policy teams. They kept about 1.5mm in revenue. It is hard being wholly dependent on a large company (Google, Facebook, etc.), but not much choice you have either when riding that wave on their product.

tssva 6y ago

For all those doing math and commenting regarding Facebook revenues vs this ad spend while you do your math keep in mind that Facebook revenues are reported in US dollars and the $57M mentioned in this article is Canadian dollars.

ppeetteerr 6y ago

A pattern that I see with tech companies like these is poor communication about features and decisions made within the company. Price changes and policy changes, understandably, are made quickly and following rules. What about when the UI changes, or when a policy change affects how a user can behave? That's probably either not communicated at all or hidden in the many, many pages of the T&Cs.

havkom 6y ago

I’m glad that FB treats everyone equally.

chimen 6y ago

Boy that "Emma C" author sure knows everything about anything. This is the lowest form of shallow content that receives millions of dollars to be in front, surpassing good stories by authors with notoriety on the subject. Facebook is the place where some of my "acquaintances" learned that Bill Gates gives them COVID, that everything is a conspiracy designed to take something from them, that the vaccine will implant them nano-chips or 5G "reactions" and sleeper nano-whatever that will wake-up on the right frequency. I hate that platform because it gives a big mouth to everyone, to the bad apple that can now infect the rest over the internet. One look at shared.com homepage and I knew...I couldn't be bothered with their story.

throwaway99x99 6y ago

"Facebook had taken action against me, personally, that one assumes are reserved for the worst in our society — criminals, pedophiles and conspiracy theorists." Yah, it's those conspiracy theorists that are the worst in society.

alpaca128 6y ago
Cult-like conspiracies like the QAnon stuff are not harmless. Comparing them to criminals is warranted, at least after the incident where one of them attempted a mass shooting. But still that quoted sentence is quite weird. Banning someone from an online platform is the standard procedure for policy violations, not just for the "worst in our society" no matter how you define those.
kurtschwanda 6y ago
I've been in therapy for years after my uncle tried to convince me the mob killed JFK.

jaywalk 6y ago

> Facebook had taken action against me, personally, that one assumes are reserved for the worst in our society — criminals, pedophiles and conspiracy theorists. Lumping in conspiracy theorists with pedophiles? This guy is an ass, his business was probably barely legitimate, and I don't feel sorry for him in the slightest.

55555 6y ago
I read this as a tongue-in-cheek joke.
sto_hristo 6y ago
Different outlets for different kinds of mental illnesses. There aren't really any levels to being disgusting. Once you hit that definition, you end up alongside with everything out there that fits it. Spreading hate, lies, paranoia, disinformation, your personal delusions is disgusting as is pedophilia.
- KirillPanov 6y ago
  This kind of intolerance is disgusting to me.

drno123 6y ago

The author of the article equates conspiracy theorists to pedophiles.

santoshalper 6y ago
I don't think he was making a value judgment. These are just groups of people Facebook is actively trying to keep off their site. His point is that his companies aren't part of those groups. Based on quick (not even remotely thorough) look at shared.com, I tend to agree. It's just a bunch of buzzfeed-level listicles, but I didn't find anything scammy or harmful. Perhaps Facebook is trying to raise the "quality" of what is shared on their platform (not just the ethics), but if that is the case I haven't heard anything about it. Facebook is absolutely stuffed to the gills with this kind of commodity-grade filler content. Based on what he posted, my guess is that the author delegated too much editorial control in his mini media empire and one of the sites in his network published some pretty objectionable content. If I were a betting man, I'd say it was COVID/vaccine related.

stevespang 6y ago

Dig deeper, the reason Facebook nixed you is that Zuck is going to reproduce your content, copycat you, and wipe you out. Apple is nixing Facebooks ecosystem from preying on Apple customers data, and the Zuck whines loud and clear with full page ads in major newspapers. Welcome to 2121.

tomaszs 6y ago

Over years of being a CEO of social media agency I have heard about a lot of such situations. Also we were helping small businesses that was harmed by Facebook actions. Sometimes it was possible to fix it, sometimes not. In this particular case I strongly believe the platform developed was competing with Facebook and it may be the cause Facebook shut it down. It is my personal opinion however and may be not true. But all of my experience and knowledge tells me so. There might be that public pressure will force Facebook to reenable the business and I hope it will happen. However there are a lot of businesses that was shut down and died because there they wasn't able to put a pressure on Facebook. It is the main reason why Facebook in particular should be prevented from making more harm, and we should all do everything what is possible to not be dependant on 3rd party companies.

beshrkayali 6y ago

This reads like an outcry from a wolf in sheep's clothing. I see this as a good sign. I haven't used Facebook in over 6 years and don't intend to. Everything Facebook is piholed on my network. But I'm glad they're starting to kick out trash content producers. And yeah, like others have said, if you spend ~$60M on Facebook ads (among others), I don't think you can call yourself a small business. This is like those 6 year old companies that still consider themselves startups. If you make enough revenue from content farms to spend that much on ads AND getting kicked off of Facebook jeopardizes your "business" that much, I'm gonna assume you engage in some dark patterns to collect/sell data of your visitors, or to place ads in shady ways, or some form of SEO pollution. At the very least, you run native ads disguised as content. I wouldn't want to have any business with you either.

gadders 6y ago

From the article: >>In total, several pages that had 21 million fans had been unpublished, and Facebook had taken action against me, personally, that one assumes are reserved for the worst in our society — criminals, pedophiles and conspiracy theorists. Er, no. Just be slightly more right-wing that the current Facebook overton window and you'll get banned.

markvdb 6y ago

agilob 6y ago
>e, I would go to great lengths to adjust my business, to right whatever wrong Facebook believes I have committed Also a reminder not to base your business on a functionality of a monster.

xwdv 6y ago

Before anyone gets too impressed (though I may be too late judging by the chorus that has formed), it's $57M CAD, and over the course of 14 years, so roughly about $3.2M USD in spending per year, or roughly $266k USD per month. Fairly typical customer.

zentiggr 6y ago

Sounds to me like this should be the zillionth warning sign that leaning on a FAANG for any significant portion of your business activities is a critical mistake. If there is no customer support, there is no reliability, period. You can delude yourself into thinking you have a resource, when what you have is a niche in somebody else's place. Of course this will throw his business into chaos. Time to sue Facebook for unfair business practices. Or if that's not allowed under the TOS, walk away and find the next path. Every story I hear paints another stroke of the picture of Facebook turning into a cesspool of AI-controlled careless swamp of attention-grabbing, only mitigated by reporting on their most callous bullshit.

mr_toad 6y ago
Lumping all the FAANG companies, or even parts of these large companies together like this is just lazy. Netflix is unreliable and has no customer support? Are iPhones unreliable? Should business not rely on AWS? HN deserves better than sweeping generalisations and shallow black and white polemics.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

flatus 6y ago

Watch whether Facebook (or a partner) duplicates Shared.com's content. This may be a very clear example of monopoly behavior.

otterley 6y ago

And nothing of value was lost.

Justin_K 6y ago

This won't be a popular comment but if your entire business model is based upon the existence of FB, you should have had a formal contract in place, as well as dedicated points of contact. I can't imagine that someone with millions in annual spend couldn't require this of FB.

richy_ 6y ago

shared.com is in the business of click arbitrage. Paying for cheap clicks on one publisher to drive clicks with another.

dmje 6y ago

Trying hard to empathise with company spending $57m on ads. Failing.

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago

I wonder if this is an opportunity for business insurance. I.e., being shunned by Facebook or Google is a high-consequence, low-probability, hard-to-predict event. You may as well treat it like building a factory in an earthquake zone.

jjk166 6y ago
Step 1: Make something that is right on the edge of being acceptable according to facebook's T&C Step 2: Take out $10 Million Policy Step 3: Have your buddy at facebook flag your content Step 4: Split money with buddy from facebook

picodguyo 6y ago

I'm surprised by all the comments blaming the author here. Even if their content is garbage, they made foolish business decisions, yadda yadda, Facebook's policy of banning business accounts and all associated personal accounts with no explanation or recourse should not be allowed legally.

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago

Lots of comments on here about whether it is good or bad to kick this particular company off the platform. Regardless of if the overall decision is good or bad, how FB goes about it, including messaging and forewarning is something that there is no excuse to not get right. Saying look at our ToS is absurd.

rajacombinator 6y ago

I totally believe their story. I got algo banned before running a single ad for an app that Apple approved. (Higher bar than FB.) Stonewalled on appeal. Makes no sense.

Krisjohn 6y ago

The thing about a gold rush is that you never know when your claim will dry up. By all means, take advantage of FB, but prepare for the day it ends.

WheelsAtLarge 6y ago

This should serve as a warning to all business owners. Relying on any one channel for your business can be very risky as we can see with the problems this business is having. I don't know if Facebook is right or wrong here but the big internet companies are big enough now that they need an independent review board for cases like this. Yet, we hear rumblings of it happening but it has not. I wonder what it will take for that to happen?

eirikurh 6y ago

Speculation: Could there be a connection to something similar to yesterday's story about Uber being defrauded? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858)

reilly3000 6y ago

Saying no to content arbitrage ads is something I can get behind!

ordu 6y ago

> If given the chance, I would go to great lengths to adjust my business, to right whatever wrong Facebook believes I have committed. I would change my business model, and shift the direction of my business to ensure I am fully compliant with Facebook’s policies. I have done it many times before. I would like to do it again. 15 years ago or so I happened to become a moderator on forum for script kiddies. I had been a temporal appointment for a month, because of another anecdotal funny story, but what I've found while being a moderator, that all those script kiddies trying to sell some stolen data were open for a discussion of their behaviour. In a good way open. Before me (and by the way after me, and even with me) the forum was a mess. A great heap of kids trying to outcry others with their offers to find a buyer for their crap. There were strictly sounding rules, like "do not post into your forum topic (to get it on top of others) more than once per day", which were violated frequently. The approach of a moderator before me was to temporarily ban anyone he caught crossing the line. I was the reason of my temporary assignment to this forum, and I tried to do the best I could. So I started to take notes, and I talked to people, explaining them what they did wrong, and what consequences they would face when I'll run out of time to talk with them. It worked like a charm, they were ready to conform to the rules, conditionally on the rules for everyone not just them. I used banning as a way to affect behaviour, but mostly short-term bans, no more than a day long, just to make sure they noticed me and to give them a feeling that they were punished enough and all their guilt is in the past redeemed and forgotten. (The guy before me could kind of dug up some half-a-year old violation and use it as an official reason for ban, while the real reason was violation of a pecking order, with him on the top). I had learned a lot from that. From the other hand I have been never worked for 12+ hours a day for a month without days off. It was exhausting. If I had some tools for automation it would be easier, but I never got time to write the tools I needed. I know that Facebook is a lot of orders of magnitude bigger then my problem was, so I'd likely be mistaken if tried to extrapolate, but nevertheless, my guess is Facebook have run out of resources to manage that mess and is trying to shrink it.

bilekas 6y ago

Shared.com has the headlines that are extremely simular to the fake add headlines you see. If I was to implement some automation to kick of agressive spammers, it would not be too hard for Shared's content to get mixed into that pile. Given how much you have to spend on Facebook ads to still generate views. I wont be losing sleep over it. Maybe its a sign to move on to more productive things.

itisit 6y ago

These so called "content recommendation engines" pollute the web with low-effort, low-quality garbage writing that hooks less discriminating users while collecting reams of data to improve ad targeting. Good riddance, I say.

rmason 6y ago

Is it at all normal to be spending millions of dollars a year at Facebook and not have a dedicated account rep? Apparently not and that boggles the mind.

ykevinator 6y ago

Shared seems a little scammy

jolincost 6y ago

This probably had nothing to do with FB proper as is simply a form of state or corporate sponsored https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung This guy or someone in his business or personal circle has caused problems for someone and they've leant on him. Around 20% of all deplatforming originates with these covert coerce requests from states or big corporate

walrus01 6y ago

This immediately set off my bullshit detector: >Our legacy promotional business, Freebies (freebies.com, free.ca), publishes notices of free samples, savings and coupons from great brands. The majority of our expenditure on Facebook is through Freebies. Translation: Promoted marketing content and clickbait sites of very little actual content value. I'm absolutely unsurprised FB banned them.

chx 6y ago

> Our legacy promotional business, Freebies (freebies.com, free.ca), publishes notices of free samples A vast amount of free samples are actually review scams. You buy the thing from Amazon, they refund you so you appear as a verified purchase and then you write a 'honest' review. I regularly report these when I see them, I presume others too, if they got involved in this sort of thing, then a ban is right.

calimac 6y ago

Facebook should be deleted.

croes 6y ago

"for safety and security reasons, we can’t give you any additional information as to why your account was disabled" that is the creepy part. We ban you but we don't tell you why.

vfclists 6y ago

A lot of the commenters are ignored the major point here. "Facebook have given them no explanation on how their content violates their guidelines" Facebook has been happy to take their money all these years, now all of a sudden they are bad guys. At the very least Facebook owes them a better explanation.

tyrex2017 6y ago

One possible explanation: Facebook knows the business violates its rules, but it cant share details, as they were obtained illegally (eg violating privacy rights)..

rkagerer 6y ago

Like the author, I built my first business on someone else's platform. It was a great niche, but eventually you hit a ceiling and run into impediments stemming from their business decisions - over which you have no control. The author seems fully aware of his situation. I hope he at least gets some explanation, but this goes to show there's no substitute for forging a trench of independence around your business model (at least where it makes sense) and growing your own ecosystem (certainly not an easy task, of course).

izzytcp 6y ago

Well well well. Junkies banning junkies. I love it.

KirillPanov 6y ago

We’ve determined that you are not eligible to use Facebook. For safety and security reasons, we can’t give you any additional information as to why your account was disabled. As someone who has never had a facebook account, I am more confused than ever about why people want anything to do with it.