4 ms·

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

by 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.
arp242 6y ago
The ~$60million is over 15 years, so it's about $330k/month on average, which is still a very substantial amount of money, but at "Facebook scale" this is pocket money you find in the sofa; their revenue is about $5.8 billion a month. For Facebook, the effect is like refusing to serve a customer their coffee at a coffee shop. I suppose that's the real problem with these kind of issues; you see the same on e.g. YouTube where even fairly large channels acting in good faith can run in to problems. I don't think there's any malice involved, but it's just too much effort to fix, there are other things going on, and they've got enough money anyway: so why bother? Even just a few years ago, Facebook's revenue was a lot smaller, so that would explain why they were more outgoing at the time.
- ike77 6y ago
  Well yes and no. FB revenue in 2019 was 70e9$. I also assume that Freebies spending was not constant over the 16 years. So their spending represented almost 1/10000 of FB revenue. I agree you can probably afford to lose that as a business owner but you probably can't be "meh, whatever" either. I expect that a decision of that scale would have probably be considered by many people / relatively highly ranked employee. (At least, at that scale, I wouldn't give the authority to two low level support staff and an algorithm to delete 1/10000 of my global revenues...)
  - arp242 6y ago
    To clarify: I don't think that "meh whatever" is literally what people are saying (to each other or themselves), it's just that there are also other customers, new leads, and all sorts of other things to do, so it's more of a "doesn't matter enough to actually take action"-kind of thing. Or, in short, "meh, whatever" :-) And there are probably other factors as well, such as poor internal communication, algorithms making poor decisions, and more. But those are all solvable problems and I suspect that "meh whatever"-attitude plays a fairly large role in them not getting fixed at various levels. I mean, if my company left 330k/month on the table then I'd run after that faster than Usain Bolt. But do you think Zuckerberg or other top-level managers at Facebook will? But I have no insight in any of this, so I'm just guessing really...
- 6y ago

by ike77 6y ago

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.

arp242 6y ago

The ~$60million is over 15 years, so it's about $330k/month on average, which is still a very substantial amount of money, but at "Facebook scale" this is pocket money you find in the sofa; their revenue is about $5.8 billion a month. For Facebook, the effect is like refusing to serve a customer their coffee at a coffee shop. I suppose that's the real problem with these kind of issues; you see the same on e.g. YouTube where even fairly large channels acting in good faith can run in to problems. I don't think there's any malice involved, but it's just too much effort to fix, there are other things going on, and they've got enough money anyway: so why bother? Even just a few years ago, Facebook's revenue was a lot smaller, so that would explain why they were more outgoing at the time.

ike77 6y ago
Well yes and no. FB revenue in 2019 was 70e9$. I also assume that Freebies spending was not constant over the 16 years. So their spending represented almost 1/10000 of FB revenue. I agree you can probably afford to lose that as a business owner but you probably can't be "meh, whatever" either. I expect that a decision of that scale would have probably be considered by many people / relatively highly ranked employee. (At least, at that scale, I wouldn't give the authority to two low level support staff and an algorithm to delete 1/10000 of my global revenues...)
- arp242 6y ago
  To clarify: I don't think that "meh whatever" is literally what people are saying (to each other or themselves), it's just that there are also other customers, new leads, and all sorts of other things to do, so it's more of a "doesn't matter enough to actually take action"-kind of thing. Or, in short, "meh, whatever" :-) And there are probably other factors as well, such as poor internal communication, algorithms making poor decisions, and more. But those are all solvable problems and I suspect that "meh whatever"-attitude plays a fairly large role in them not getting fixed at various levels. I mean, if my company left 330k/month on the table then I'd run after that faster than Usain Bolt. But do you think Zuckerberg or other top-level managers at Facebook will? But I have no insight in any of this, so I'm just guessing really...
6y ago