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Naively, divide ad revenue by time to get a dollars-per-time. But thats naive because ad serving isn’t totally sold out so they can make up for it by increasin

Naively, divide ad revenue by time to get a dollars-per-time. But thats naive because ad serving isn’t totally sold out so they can make up for it by increasing the density of ads in the next time window. If the outage is short, then the impact is small. But some markets are totally sold out and there’s no making up for lost impressions.

MarcellusDrum 3y ago
This is something I've thought about a while back. Like Facebook probably has a "maximum number of ads shown to users per post" value. So theoretically, they have a ceiling for how many ads can be bought in a specific time frame before having to increase the ceiling/find new users. Do they share data about this?
- post-it 3y ago
  > before having to increase the ceiling/find new users. Or raise the prices of ads.
bananapub 3y ago
> they can make up for it by increasing the density of ads in the next time window no need to do that, for google search, people will come back later to make the search
- thehappypm 3y ago
  Yes, but, they’ll need to serve X ads in a smaller amount of time
bmau5 3y ago
They also do not refund spend during this time typically so wouldn't be a 1:1
- sbrother 3y ago
  They don't? I've worked in ad tech at some smaller places and we absolutely refunded spend during outages.
  - bmau5 3y ago
    From my experience you'll receive a partial refund - and in some instances like inexplicable overspending, etc. - you won't receive anything. This may be an exception given a full sitewide outage, though
  - chatmasta 3y ago
    How is money even being spent if users aren't viewing the ads?
    - thehappypm 3y ago
      Not all ad spend is impression based, there are things like takeovers. And, sometimes impression counts arent guaranteed, theyre estimated
  - lenerdenator 3y ago
    That's because they were some smaller places. When you've more-or-less monopolized a lot of the web's content sharing you get to tell your clients to pound sand. Where else they gonna go? Twitter? The incel white supremacist dollar is not what advertisers call "the good dollar".
kevincox 3y ago
> they can make up for it by increasing the density of ads in the next time window Not only that but the bigger spenders will have more budget so the bidding after a large outage should return higher bids on average leading to increased profit per ad slot.
- thehappypm 3y ago
  Possibly, but increasing ad density is usually negative for performance. So it’ll probably be end of bad for Meta as a whole, as people spend more but don’t get more value out.

MarcellusDrum 3y ago

This is something I've thought about a while back. Like Facebook probably has a "maximum number of ads shown to users per post" value. So theoretically, they have a ceiling for how many ads can be bought in a specific time frame before having to increase the ceiling/find new users. Do they share data about this?

post-it 3y ago
> before having to increase the ceiling/find new users. Or raise the prices of ads.

bananapub 3y ago

> they can make up for it by increasing the density of ads in the next time window no need to do that, for google search, people will come back later to make the search

thehappypm 3y ago
Yes, but, they’ll need to serve X ads in a smaller amount of time

bmau5 3y ago

They also do not refund spend during this time typically so wouldn't be a 1:1

sbrother 3y ago
They don't? I've worked in ad tech at some smaller places and we absolutely refunded spend during outages.
- bmau5 3y ago
  From my experience you'll receive a partial refund - and in some instances like inexplicable overspending, etc. - you won't receive anything. This may be an exception given a full sitewide outage, though
- chatmasta 3y ago
  How is money even being spent if users aren't viewing the ads?
  - thehappypm 3y ago
    Not all ad spend is impression based, there are things like takeovers. And, sometimes impression counts arent guaranteed, theyre estimated
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  That's because they were some smaller places. When you've more-or-less monopolized a lot of the web's content sharing you get to tell your clients to pound sand. Where else they gonna go? Twitter? The incel white supremacist dollar is not what advertisers call "the good dollar".

kevincox 3y ago

> they can make up for it by increasing the density of ads in the next time window Not only that but the bigger spenders will have more budget so the bidding after a large outage should return higher bids on average leading to increased profit per ad slot.

thehappypm 3y ago
Possibly, but increasing ad density is usually negative for performance. So it’ll probably be end of bad for Meta as a whole, as people spend more but don’t get more value out.