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Facebook buying ads for Messenger to be top result when you search for 'Signal'
- christiansakai 6y agoWe are seeing the end of life of Facebook. After Apple, now this. This company is gasping for life.
- cm2187 6y agoThat’s what I don’t understand. Everyone I know has migrated away from facebook a long time ago. And a few years ago I heard stories suggesting this was a broad movement. People organising their birthday on facebook and no one showing up, etc. Kids today aren’t using facebook either. But facebook’s results suggest they are growing their active user base. So if those numbers are real, their user base must shift. At least away from european+educated users.
- Ekaros 6y agoI don't think it's going anywhere. But then I read stuff about Oculus and how hard it is to create new accounts. If that is true the user base growing would be strange... Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle...
- nabaraj 6y agoIt is true people have migrated away from facebook but it is also true they have migrated to instagram which is owned by facebook.
- qq4 6y agoIf these statistics [1] [2] are correct then there's a significant global population still using Facebook that exists outside of Western populations. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-based-on-number-of-facebook-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
- rajman187 6y agoInterestingly I see an ad for Tiktok when I search for WhatsApp
- holler 6y agoThat's funny, I installed tiktok the other day and noticed ads for Messenger every time I opened the app
- suyash 6y agolol that's funny..it will make people like me more inclined to install Signal than every before.
- Ekaros 6y agoI don't think they are targeting users who have ideological stance. But the average people searching for the new thing they hear about...
- aluminussoma 6y agoI click on the ads of products I dislike so that the company gets charged for the ad. If you wanted to inflict the maximum damage, then click on the ad and install the app. Uninstall it later. I think the ad gets charged more as a "conversion".
- jmholla 6y agoSadly with Facebook,you can't be sure they won't install a backdoor application that will reinstall it after you uninstall it. That may just be some phones with Facebook and Messenger preloaded though.
- mcintyre1994 6y agoYes you can be sure that they’re not doing that on iOS.
- noarchy 6y agoIt would have to be something preloaded, and with unusual privileges. Otherwise, it isn't installing anything silently on Android. I don't think this would happen at all on iOS.
- drops 6y agoIf it's a company as big as Facebook, I think those charges are drops in the ocean of their entire revenue, so you waste more of your time and nerves on doing that than the money they lose.
- endymi0n 6y agoWhile you're technically correct, you're also making a conversion right there, which increases your ad relevancy score on most auction driven platforms including Google and — ironically — Facebook, which in turn leads to this ad actually getting _cheaper_ to run for the advertiser on other customers coming after you. I'm not in deep enough to tell you whether that's a net loss or benefit, but it's probably close enough to zero...
- 6y ago
- ericmay 6y agoI find this to be a bit strange from a marketing perspective and the cost to run this campaign has to be non-trivial. If someone searches for Signal, what is the likelihood they don't already know what Facebook Messenger is? What is this ad supposed to convince someone of? Like you see the ad after searching for Signal and go "oh I have Facebook Messenger"? I guess maybe there might be some who don't know about Facebook Messenger and so they heard about this new Signal app and now they see a new chat app that works with Facebook. I'm sure there's analytics and testing behind the decision to support it.
- Klonoar 6y agoFWIW, I can tell you my father goes with whatever's in the ad 99% of the time. It's led to some... interesting... situations to fix. But there are absolutely people like this, and FB makes money off of them in droves.
- ALittleLight 6y agoUsers who click on ads are probably the best users to have.
- z3t4 6y agoThats why Facebook are targeting them.
- marcinzm 6y agoCynically I'm guessing it's for potential new users who have heard of Signal vaguely and inducing brand confusion. "Oh, Signal is part of Facebook Messenger, cool, already have that."
- adonese 6y agoThis actually reminds me of Tim Sweeney's tweets regarding stores policies[1]. [1]: https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1019852527007944704 https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/101985252700794470...
- marcinzm 6y agoI'm guessing that for the app store team everything except the ad revenue is in essence a cost center. The company makes money from it but it's not tied back to the app store team or not tied back directly enough. Ad revenue however is tied back directly. So they optimize the KPI they are measured on.
- bigiain 6y ago> everything except the ad revenue is in essence a cost center Really? Seems a very strange thing to think, particularly in a thread mentioning Epic games, who've chosen to allow Fortnite to be delisted from the app store in protest over the 30% commission the store takes on their sales... My suspicion is that ad revenue in Apple's app store is insignificant compared to revenue from paid app commissions. (I do have nothing except gut feel and some probably obly vaguely informed opinion to base that on...)
- marcinzm 6y agoI said app store team not Apple overall. To Apple its revenue, to the team running the store app its a cost center. Or maybe a better way to say it is that the gains from improving user experience do not trickle down to them enough. After all, many many teams will claim credit and take a slice of that pie. However, only a few teams can claim credit for ad revenue. Within a large company the goals of the company and the goals of individual teams are rarely fully aligned.
- saagarjha 6y agoApp Store Ads are genuinely awful. I have yet to find any that have been anything but spam apps or companies buying their competitor's keywords. They quite definitely make the App Store worse.
- oliwarner 6y agoOur great-grandchildren are going to look back on history and struggle to understand why we used a search engines that intentionally accept bribes to poison their SERPs. I hope we can get this right one day. Allowing trademark squatting helps nobody but scammers (and search engines).
- Grimm1 6y agoHear hear.
- chrischen 6y agoAs a relatively small business with no clout we've had to deal with fly-by-night operations violating our trademark with Google ads (basically randoms running ads that look like they are from US when people search our web domain) and Google not doing anything because we didn't register the trademark. Of course Google won't do anything—it'd hurt their bottom line!
- marcinzm 6y agoAs I understand it, if you didn't register the trademark then it's not your trademark legally except as a defense against lawsuits. So Google seems to have followed the law. Better than them becoming some sort of extra-legal arbitrator of quasi-trademarks.
- oliwarner 6y agoThis is exactly the mentality I was talking about in my first comment. You think it's better than Google only follows the letter of the law, and destroy it's search credibility, than put some process in place to prevent deceptive advertising. Searching for one thing, seeing something different at the top of the page feels pretty deceptive to me. If it didn't work, they probably wouldn't do it.
- mehrdadn 6y agoIt seems difficult to do this in general when so many search terms can have multiple meanings. Are you suggesting there should be human review for every ad? (Which is not saying it's necessarily a bad idea; just trying to understand how you imagine it'd work.)
- MKais 6y agoWhatsapp displays 404 not found when I send a link to Signal https://www.dropbox.com/s/0t5venwty2oe2re/Screenshot%202021-01-10%20at%2022.50.34.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/0t5venwty2oe2re/Screenshot%202021-...
- srfvtgb 6y agoSeems like a pretty blatant antiturst violation if this is happening consistently.
- MikusR 6y agoThey are a private service and can do whatever they want. edit: I am just repeating the narrative I have seen on HN the last couple of days.
- fsflover 6y agoNot if they are a monopoly.
- quadrangle 6y agoYour comment could be read as suggesting that private companies are above the law. I assume you mean just "this particular sort of anti-competitive behavior is legal because it's all within their private service".
- godelski 6y agoMore importantly it would mean the link previews aren't e2ee. ,,BUT'' I cannot reproduce the error.
- mhh__ 6y agoUnfortunately they operate in the US so they can't https://youtu.be/gRelVFm7iJE https://youtu.be/gRelVFm7iJE
- folli 6y ago
- Jakobeha 6y ago"Ah, yes. I'm looking for a peer-to-peer, secure messaging system. What's this, Facebook Messenger? Maybe I'll try that instead." In all seriousness though, this kind of advertising should not be beneficial to Facebook. You're telling a group of people biased not to buy your product, to buy your product. There's obviously some other reason.
- laurent92 6y agoWhen I’m annoyed with an ad, I love clicking on it, especially since a click can cost from $.5 to $12. Also, upon clicking, they build a profile of me based on products I don’t like, so all the better. Tough for the advertiser, but maximizing advertiser dissatisfaction is also in my interest (at least since I don’t advertise anymore - after an important realization that I had poured money into it for very few actual new customers).
- the_pwner224 6y agohttps://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
- Apocryphon 6y agoCould use of this be detected by the ad networks and get filtered out?
- bigiain 6y agoIt _could_... But the ad networks get paid for those clicks, so while businesses keep buying ads from a known[1] mostly fraudulent industry, they will not. 1: "Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend" -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858
- renewiltord 6y agoIt's usually detected by anti-click-fraud stuff (since it's the same UA, cookies, and IP that's mass whacking ads, it's the easy case). However, the users of the tool occasionally intend to punish the publishers (people who put these ads on their sites) which does happen for some low volume publishers - like your buddy's blog with AdSense and stuff.
- st1x7 6y agoThis is kind of embarassing. Do you guys think that the people at Facebook who make these decisions realise how pathetic it looks from the outside? Or are they somehow justifying it in their own heads?
- colejohnson66 6y agoThey don’t “realize it’s pathetic” because it’s SOP for companies buying ads to bid on their competitor’s name. You can argue that that is pathetic, but this one instance isn’t special.
- threeseed 6y agoMy partner runs a small business and bidding on competitors is recommended by many marketing blogs. It's extremely common now and before the internet this sort of marketing i.e. positioning against your competitor was also extremely common.
- ergocoder 6y agoAs a consumer, I also want to know the competitors on the product I'm buying. I don't think this practice is generally bad.
- CitizenHeat 6y ago"If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem is a nail."
- annadane 6y agoFuck you, Facebook. Edit: Don't flag me. Fuck you too. It's a perfectly legitimate comment.
- monokh 6y agoThis practice is called "Brand bidding" and is actually extremely common among competitors. Occasionally companies will mutually agree to not participate. It's actually surprising why it's not perceived to be more hostile.
- giarc 6y agoYa this is kind of a non-story. They were probably bidding on 'Signal' prior to this current set of events anyways. And since Signal doesn't appear to be bidding on it's own name, Facebook is probably paying very little for that top spot.
- st1x7 6y agoBidding on your name might be an even bigger waste of money than bidding on a competitor's name, especially for established brands. eBay's experience with this came up on a recent episode of Freakonomics - https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoWhenever I search for a brand by name and an ad for them pops up (in the rare case that I’m browsing without an ad blocker), I try to click on the non ad version right below it just to save them a bit of money.
- shard972 6y agoYou are not facebooks target audience.
- srfvtgb 6y agoI don't know if this is still the case, but for a while the easiest way to get the best deal from Dominoes was to search Google for Pizza Hut with your adblocker turned off.
- glandium 6y ago
- jonas21 6y agoIt's possible that Facebook isn't intentionally targeting Signal. When buying App Store ads, the default is to use a "broad match" for the keywords you enter -- i.e. Apple automatically decides what keywords are similar to the keywords you selected and runs your ads against those as well. It's pretty annoying because there's no way to switch the default -- you have to remember to put your keywords in brackets to disable it -- but probably great for Apple's revenue.
- gotem 6y agoJesus no one here seems to understand how ad targeting or bidding works.
- minhazm 6y agoI would assume they’ve been doing this for a long time. Lots of companies do stuff like this. If you’re against this then you have to be against basically all search ads. You can go search for Venmo or Cash App now and you’ll see ads for some other banking products.
- Apocryphon 6y agoIt definitely seems like a policy that should be reexamined. If you're a newcomer to a market and a big entrenched player buys up all of the search ads with your product's name, how can you hope to be discovered via SEO?
- minhazm 6y agoAds are pretty clearly highlighted as such at the top. If your SEO is good then you will still be at the top, just below the ads. I do agree that a lot of these companies do have the ability to use advertising to crush their competition, but I’m not sure what the solution is to that.
- mxxx 6y agoYeah everybody here is up in arms because it's FB/Signal but this is as old as the hills. Search for any major product and most of the ads will be their competitors. Not sure why this is a big deal. Is it good? No. Is it new? Not particularly.
- dylan604 6y agoThis is one of the major reasons that I don't believe search ads are worth anything for any but the largest of players. There will always be someone with a larger check book, especially if you are just starting and bootstrapping your thing. The playing field is always tilted in the direction of the larger player
- fossuser 6y agoThis is incredibly obnoxious and Apple should ban it. I've seen it for any popular app - at best it's a tax apple is charging apps to protect themselves by buying ad slots for their own name. At worst it's an attack on old people. Whenever I see it I think less of the company trying to manipulate less technical users.
- balozi 6y agoWhy would Apple ban a mutually beneficial ploy? They are all in it together. We are the suckers.
- fossuser 6y agoBecause long term thinking and good relationships with users is worth more than whatever small % of revenue Apple gets from letting these shitty search ads scam old people and less technical users. You should not be able to buy ads on a company name that isn’t yours. I suspect people higher up at Apple that see this would agree and change policy if they thought about it.
- DeafSquid 6y agoWell, let's all search for Signal and waste Facebook's ad money
- throwaway7281 6y agoIt's funny, if it weren't that sneaky and scuzzy and very much in line with what FB excels at: web scale deceit.
- iphorde 6y agoThe FBI, Google, Facebook, ... are working with congress to change Signal, and other apps. They want a backdoor. See Christopher Wray's testimony in Jan 2020. I'm sure this will be accelerated.
- leoplct 6y agoI wonder why not using a chat based on BitTorrent protocol?
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- dave_sid 6y agoHas anyone recently tried searching for ‘Signal’ to check this? I don’t see any Facebook Messenger ads personally. Think this is a bit of marketing from Signal.
- Ansil849 6y agoThose who work at Facebook, of which there are many on HN: how do you justify or rationalize your employer engaging in behavior like this?
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- scarface74 6y agoThe entire idea of ads in the App Store is slimy. Half the reason I buy Apple stuff is because the transaction model is simple - I give Apple money and they give me stuff.
- nalekberov 6y ago>P.S. There will never be ads in Signal, because your data belongs in your hands not ours. I don't believe my data belongs in my hands when I use Signal, because they own the servers and the only one who takes design decisions for backend side are they.
- dang 6y agoCould you please make your substantive points without breaking the site guidelines? They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- tbodt 6y agoWhich site guideline does this break?
- ro_bit 6y agoNot dang but probably > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
- nalekberov 6y agolol i have no idea what to with that in this context.
- ro_bit 6y agoWhen Signal says your data belongs in your hands, they are referencing the end to end encryption in the app, which means that any of your data that goes through their servers is encrypted and can't be read by them. This can be verified by people partaking in a Signal message through the use of their safety numbers and through building the app from their published source that you can verify only ever sends your encrypted data to Signal servers. It's true that we can never be sure what's in Signal's backend but we can also prove that anything we send to their backend can't be read by them regardless of its design.
- golemiprague 6y agoWell, at least with messenger I know it will be there and nobody will remove it from the app store. How do I know tomorrow someone is not going to decide that right wing ideas are exchanged on Signal and therefore it will be banned from everything? I'd rather stay with our current overlords until the people will revolt against them.
- kerng 6y agoWonder if they can be sued for trademark infringement over this?
- Darmody 6y agoDon't worry, this is only another decision that Facebook takes for your own good. They only want to connect the world.
- anigbrowl 6y agoAdvertising is evil episode 3457 I know I say this a lot but ad-supported business models are corrupting. Spam is the original sin of the open internet and the unwillingness to get to grips with this is a big part of why we can't have nice things. Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie... On Usenet, which ran on NNTP, every user could maintain their own killfile, which would allow people to hide spam. But it wasn't easy to share killfiles, and while the more technically capable people would easily filter it out they were also blinding themselves to a problem that eventually choked the life out of the community. Similar observations could be made about advertising on the web, from standardized banners leading towards today's web horrible mess. The basic problem is that the costs of spamming and lying are generally a lot lower than the potential profits, so the more opent he system the more spam it tends to attract. Try looking at used car adverts on Craigslist for example, dealers in busy areas tend to run a hundred ads a day with 500 keywords. Some people flag them, of course, but most don't bother and the profit in selling a single car is worth the minor downsides.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago> Similar observations could be made about advertising on the web, from standardized banners leading towards today's web horrible mess. I think we have two separate issues here. One is the business model problem. Google puts ads on YouTube, then out-competes actually-free software alternatives because they have money from advertising and for-pay alternatives because they don't charge money to users. Hello surveillance capitalism. The other is the Twitter problem. It's harder to block (only) low-quality posts than make them, therefore Twitter. I think the first one is just a coordination problem. We need a one-time expenditure to get the likes of PeerTube to a level of usability, reliability and performance equal to YouTube, and that's it. Then you don't need YouTube anymore, or Twitter or Gmail or anything else that could be replaced in that way. It takes a one-time expenditure of resources to create the technology, so we just need a way to raise the money. Once it exists it's a lot easier to raise the smaller amount of money needed for incremental improvements. (And really it's already happening but it's taking too long to get to the mass adoption phase for lack of resources.) The second problem is harder, but maybe some kind of proof of work system for account creation. So there is a one-time cost of some kind for account creation, negligible for an ordinary user who will use it for ten years but costly to a spammer who will have their account blocked with all its posts removed in 30 seconds. Also, in article about first commercial spammer: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie... > Occupation: lawyer (disbarred in 1997)
- harikb 6y agoIf it is fair for Apple to sell ads inside App Store’s search feature, it is perfectly fair for someone to buy a competitors keywords. This is also done all the time. I find the App Store to be the one to fault by making the ad look the same as a search result
- stanislavb 6y agoAs they know that people are leaving and replacing them
- rubycon22 6y agoIf someone is searching for Signal, what makes them see Messenger and decide to click that instead? I don't understand how this isn't throwing money into a fire.
- purerandomness 6y agoMost people outside the tech bubble can't tell an ad from a search result. They don't use ad blockers either, that's why banners saying "DOWNLOAD NOW" in flashing red letters work so well, leading them to download something completely different from that antivirus or PDF reader software they originally searched for.
- shripadk 6y agoTheir target audience are the elderly and those who are illiterate in technology in general. I have personally seen people around me click the first result that shows up without even stopping to read what is written on it. They just assume that "I asked for Signal and it is Signal". That is the amount of trust they have. It is only when they get fooled do they go through multiple stages of confusion before they finally realize what is up: Hey why do I have this app? -> I never downloaded it -> Is this a virus? -> Have I been hacked? -> Let me ask my relative/friend who is a computer geek -> Oh it is something I download myself? -> Oh this isn't Signal? -> Oh okay I get it now -> Shall I uninstall it? -> Okay I'll uninstall. There are some who skip this and just assume that the app they downloaded is Signal even if the app clearly says Facebook Messenger. ^ This is how scamsters take advantage of the elderly and those who do not have basic tech know-how. You'll be surprised to know that there are millions like that.
- emrah 6y agoWould it be permissible to place a giant billboard on the sidewalk right in front of your competitor's store? It's unethical and anti-competitive to try to drown out your competition because you have enough money to be able to do it. IMO both Google and Facebook should be punished for allowing it and doing it respectively. It shouldn't be possible to bid for your competitors' names.
- gu5 6y agoThis is a really agressive move from facebook. Now when people switch from whatsapp to signal, some will assume messanger is better and not notice the tiny ad badge.