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How Facebook is trying to recover the money it lost during the outage
- cbsmith 5y agoThis is just ad networks doing what ad networks do.
- nosedrip 5y agoDSPs are like dogs if you let them be: they eat all the budget, you want them to act like cats and stop eating when they're 'full'. If the outage causes budget to be spend in an accelerated way, this will probably mean less relevant ad placements.
- jlund-molfese 5y agoIs it not possible the ads are being shown to more people than usual due to greater usage of Facebook properties immediately following it coming back online? I can’t find anything that indicates individuals are seeing more ads than usual as a result of the outage, besides the anecdote of the one agency in the article (but maybe the lower conversion rates can be explained by some other factors)
- alek_m 5y agoIt's not agency per-se; it's one agency managing multiple clients and seeing the same pattern across all of them.
- jlund-molfese 5y agoYes, but I wonder if this anonymous agency has clients all in the same geographic area or industry. The sample size is too small to draw definitive conclusions, because there might be confounding factors, or maybe the agency even made a mistake somewhere. Of course, the type of data that would be really useful here (detailed ad performance metrics by the hour, across all of Facebook) is the type fb would never willingly publish.
- stevespang 5y agoThis was Zuckerbergs idea - - so much of the hideous evil comes directly from the top . . .
- danuker 5y agoDo dealings with unethical companies, get scammed by unethical companies.
- ashtonkem 5y agoOver a mere $60mil, no less. Literally nothing in the grand scheme of Facebook’s profits.
- pixelgeek 5y agoThis is the thing that I thought was interesting. I suspect that it has less to do with actual profits and more to do with some wanting to keep their quarterly ad impression numbers up
- ashtonkem 5y agoI think much specifically it’s internal competition. My bet, I have no insider knowledge here, is that there are a bunch of individual product owners vying to look good compared to each other here. Nobody wants to have their weekly numbers look bad because they didn’t accelerate delivery while their peers do, so as a whole the company does something bad for everyone over a trifling amount of profit.
- pixelgeek 5y agoI think that is probably exactly what it is
- furyg3 5y agoYes this reeks of someones KPI needing to be hit.
- colinmhayes 5y ago.2% of Facebook's gross income if anyone is wondering.
- Forge36 5y agoA 50% conversion drop? I wonder what method they have to show ads faster
- pixl97 5y agoRemember back in the early 2000's before popup blockers were a thing? You'd hit a page and 100 popups fill the page. When you hit the X and it would spawn new popups filled with ads. Yea, that's FBs new business model :D
- saalweachter 5y agoI do hear a lot of nostalgia for "the old internet".
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoShowing ads for cars when the user searched for bars.
- ineedasername 5y agoMaybe just showing more of them in a page?
- willcipriano 5y ago"We're really sorry that we didn't manage to get your ad about nursing homes in this months issue of AARP monthly, however we managed to get it into Rad Skateboarders Weekly so we will be sending you a invoice for it anyway."
- intricatedetail 5y agoWhere is a tiny violin when you need it?
- Macha 5y agoThis doesn't seem _that_ strange. In online advertising, there are the concepts of pacing (to ensure the ad campaign delivers somewhat evenly over the lifespan - not because there's any evidence that it improves performance, but because the advertiser would feel miffed if you spent all the budget in the first day of their month long campaign), and frequency capping (attempting not to show the same ad to the same person too many times - clearer benefits to performance here). Both of these will limit the rate at which an ad spends money. If it doesn't get shown for a long period of time, both of these factors get reduced, and the ad can get selected more aggressively, particularly if you are a higher bidder than the ads that would have got chosen in your absence.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ineedasername 5y agopacing... not because there's any evidence that it improves In the limited experience I have in this arena, it does improve performance. Hitting someone a second time about t+2weeks had the biggest bump, and then the next biggest another month later at t+6weeks. I don't know if it's universally true, and the optimization may vary depending on the context and content, but pacing can definitely make a difference for some.
- Gigachad 5y agoI don’t think they were talking about the same person seeing the ad, but if you show 1000 people the ad a day for 10 days or show 10,000 people the ad in one day.
- ineedasername 5y agoThat would be different, but I think still have a negative impact. You can't show 10,000 people the same number of ads in the same period of time as usual while also delivering ads faster. So it means you're showing people more ads than usual. But attention is a limited resource. If you throw more ads at me, I'm not necessarily going to respond to more of them. The more ads there are, the more it becomes background noise.
- Waspdotmk 5y agoWell everything for the upper hand. They’re (fb) are becoming a comical villain in this story.
- bob229 5y agoFacebook is an evil empire
- mohirul 5y agonice project
- habeebtc 5y agoWhile shady on Facebook's part, it does match the general shadiness of Facebook ads. It is legit hard to find ads which are not a scam in some way.
- moooo99 5y agoI mean what is a shady about the dropshipping store trying to sell you a cheap imported product for a 400% markup or the guru with the rented Lamborghini who is trying to sell you on his course on how to 10000x your money by trading forex? /s I know the example mentioned is facebook, but I feel like a similar development is going on with other ad networks as well. Even on YouTube around 40-50% of all ads I get are by some guy trying to sell me on his dropshipping, forex trading, crypto or tax evasion course.
- Ziehm99 5y agoEs una buena alternativa para evitar que los anunciantes se aprovechen de generar dinero ilicito.
- Ziehm99 5y agoEs una buena alternativa para evitar que los anunciantes sigan generando dinero sin pagar membresias a Facebook, realmente fue una decisión acertada.
- willcipriano 5y agoAre we post honor? I have this magical machine that makes me, what ten million dollars an hour? After many years of constant service, one of my employees messes up and it goes down for a few hours. Rather then eating the loss, that isn't much of loss since my margins are as wide as the grand canyon, I crank the machine up so it runs faster and produces a inferior quality product. Did Veruca Salt grow up and get a job at Facebook?
- Clubber 5y ago"That terminator is out there, it cant be bargained with, it cant be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop... EVER, until you are dead!"
- zpeti 5y agoWhen you setup a facebook ad, you literally say to them: spend $100 per day. Then Facebook has a 6 hour outage. Facebook can then show more ads to users per time on Facebook, to get to the $100 per day. Or it can only spend $75 that day. I imagine some advertisers will prefer the first option, some the second. Facebook's machine learning algorithms will do something. But I don't see the massively malicious intent here. Most likely this isn't even a human decision. The algorithms just know then have to spend $100 per day. Fine, if there really are 50% less conversions, that's an issue, but frankly 6 hours won't really matter.
- ctvo 5y ago> Fine, if there really are 50% less conversions, that's an issue, but frankly 6 hours won't really matter. You buried the lede with things we already know for some reason. Two things: - It's 6 hours and 60 million dollars to them, which is absolutely nothing, but they risked harming their customers (advertisers) over it. This was Facebook's screw-up, and now they're passing it on to their advertisers. When you view advertisers as captured, you worry less about their experience and attempt to extract as much value as possible. - It's systemic. Someone in another thread mentioned there are good people at Facebook, and they can't reconcile the behavior exposed in internal documents with those good people. This is a great example. When your performance is tied to metrics like advertiser spend, even when you had the largest outage in your recent history, you'll immediately hop on afterwards to direct your team to try and extract the most money out of advertisers possible to make up for it. These individual incentives add up to form the predatory company that we see externally.
- stickfigure 5y agoI think it's a bit too early to break out the outrage cannon. This is just an automated system. They're probably still putting out the fires and assessing damage. It will be some time before somebody can assess the data and figure out what "the right thing" for customers is. If you were an ad customer during this period and you feel you weren't getting your expected value, ask for a credit? If you weren't - why are you so upset? Are you just looking for some excuse to feel angry at Facebook?
- malikfarhan 5y agoGood job
- architweetka 5y agoDid we ever hear what caused it?
- stepanhruda 5y agohttps://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/05/networking-traffic/outage-details/ https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/05/networking-traffic/out...
- fatnoah 5y agoBy showing 1/365 more ads every day for the next year?
- aleppe7766 5y agoThis is too stupid to be true. For a 6-hour outage to significantly increase the ad frequency (and lower the conversion rate) you should pressure the system to recover the outage in a day or two; do they really need it? We're not even at the end of the month...
- motoboi 5y agoWe all hate facebook. Ok. No problema. But Facebook is actually trying to help its costumers recover the money lost during the outage. US$ 60 million? Pff. Just ask every executive to skip one executive jet travel per week and they recover that in a month or less.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Bud 5y agoThis sounds like straight-up fraud to me. They promised one thing, and now, after an outage that was their own fault, they are intentionally warping and devaluing the nature of the advertising product they sold to customers, so that instead of Facebook deservedly absorbing that loss, customers will absorb it, instead.
- shadowgovt 5y agoNot precisely fraud, but it is an example of the negatives of the product vendor (impressions, in this case) also owning the marketplace. It would be rational for advertisers to pull down their spend to avoid getting hit with devalued impressions. Ironically, if enough folks did, that could cause a panic, which would make things worse for FB.
- mannykannot 5y agoI am no fan at all of Facebook, and I would tend to regard the prospect of a dispute between it and its advertisers as a good thing, but here's a slightly-expanded version of the passage quoted in the article: "We can also confirm that ads did not deliver during the time the systems were offline, and advertisers were not and will not be billed for ads during the outage. Ads have now resumed delivery and some advertisers may see accelerated delivery as our services recover from the outage. We encourage advertisers to review your bids and budgets to ensure they accurately reflect your marketing goals." One way of looking at this is that Facebook is notifying its advertisers that the outage will affect how advertising is delivered in the following days, and if advertisers want something else to happen, they will have to make the changes themselves. Facebook could reasonably claim that it does not know how any given advertiser would prefer the situation to be handled. Of course, if it is expensive or inordinately difficult to make such adjustments, then Facebook would come across as dissembling (and not for the first time.)
- fairity 5y agoReader beware. Don't take unsubstantiated claims (such as this article) as fact. As someone who spends five figures daily on FB, I saw no such drop in performance -- nor have other advertisers I've been in touch with. Performance on FB (especially at low volumes) is highly volatile on a day-over-day basis. So, at any time, there will always be a subset of advertisers who think "CPA's are skyrocketing". And, it's easy to draw the conclusion that the pattern is platform-wide. The "accelerated delivery" that Facebook quoted in its response only applied to the remainder of the day that the outage took place -- not future days as the article suggests.
- EastOfTruth 5y agoAre you getting a discount for this comment?
- colpabar 5y agoplease stop giving them so much money :)
- mrRandomGuy 5y agoYou spend 5 figures daily on Facebook and didn't notice any drop in performance when the site was gone for half the day? Do you actually need to spend that much..?
- fairity 5y ago> You didn't notice any drop in performance when the site was gone for half the day? Delivery for the day dropped, but performance as measured through CPA (or ROAS) remained stable. > Do you actually need to spend that much..? Ultimately, we're trying to maximize profit. So, we advertise until the cost per incremental conversion is greater than a customer's ltv.
- Reubachi 5y agoI'm a layman in availability and how your service relies upon it, But how can your engagement from clients be "the same", despite half the availability? Does this imply that all else perfect andavailable,every day, you could have a volatile swing of up to 50 percent engagement? If so, that seems really really silly to drop 10k+ on daily, if on half of all days you don't NEED the platform for half the day...what am I missing?
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoFacebook is the same company that has allowed a bunch of scam artists to advertise a $1500 ice machine for $30 (which is their S&H cost) while using another company's name in their ads. I can't remember the last time I got on facebook and saw a useful ad that wasn't either a scam or completely irrelevant.
- atkailash 5y agoI hate this language. They didn’t lose money to recover. It’s not like they dropped their wallet. They simply just didn’t get it, it was never theirs to lose. This sort of language for businesses is ridiculous and seems almost classist, like the money people earn somehow belongs to the businesses we spend it on. I don’t say I’m losing millions a day because I’m not CEO of Facebook anymore than they lost money by not having a running service.