6 ms·

Facebook 'likes' and adverts' value doubted

47 points by molecule 14y ago

BlackNapoleon 14y ago
Seems like this will always be the case since social media isn't tangible anyways.
dangrossman 14y ago
I don't care if 50% of Facebook profiles are fake as long as the long-term ROI of the advertising is positive. Measure the impact on actual goals, not intermediates like number of likes. Facebook's worked for me; I've been advertising there consistently for about a year now. http://i.imgur.com/r0RQ5.png http://i.imgur.com/r0RQ5.png As far as disproportionate responses from the Phillippines and Egypt, if you don't limit the audience you show your ad to, you're gonna get bad results everywhere, not just Facebook.
- dsirijus 14y ago
  I completely agree with your statement, but the problem with current state of affairs is that just plain Like number counts towards brand awareness, and many clients of agencies providing Facebook advertising don't come there for basically any measurable ROI 'cept building brand on the platform, which is, imho, the best Facebook can provide as far as advertising goes.
- barrkel 14y ago
  It's not enough to measure the ROI on the advertising; the ROI needs to be higher than the alternatives. In other words, are you considering opportunity cost?
  - dangrossman 14y ago
    That makes little sense. Placing new advertising takes almost no time at all. It's not like you need to consult the design department; your only creative on Facebook is 100 characters of text. One employee can create dozens of new placements each day. You advertise everywhere that's effective at the same time, not just the single most effective place.
nmridul 14y ago
Nothing surprising. Just visit Fiverr.com and you can buy 100+ facebook likes for $5. And you will get likes from US, UK too.
wiradikusuma 14y ago
What is the incentive for those bots to like/click the ads? The stakeholders are (1) Facebook users (might be fake/bots) who like/click ads (2) Facebook (3) Companies promoting their product in FB (4) Agencies which put the ads on company behalf. (2) and (4) have the monetary incentive.
- nbm 14y ago
  It could also be criminal groups that are trying to make their profiles appear less fake. I worked with the team that fight spam, scams, and the fake accounts that distribute them when I started at Facebook, and they expend a lot of time writing code and building machine learning models to detect fake accounts. There would be no fake accounts if there wasn't a massive financial upside to it, and so they do the strangest things to try avoid the detection. You can read a bit about what the team does at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ldg/a10-stein.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ldg/a10-stein.p...
- throwaway032496 14y ago
  To add a bit more into your information the appearance of ads from the end user perspective is random (3) and (4) could not be done automatically, because you'd have to know the exact moment the relevant ad was to appear. Serving the ads is automated à la Google auction technique so unpredictable. The only way to spoof that is to expand the targeted audience. The automated ad clicks that I refer to is demonstrated by a gaping hole in the data consistency, which would not otherwise occur if the action was taking place outside of Facebook's own servers.
andys627 14y ago
Crappy title - should focus on issue of likes from fake accounts, not value of any like
dsirijus 14y ago
Most of the Facebook agencies did their own inflation of Pages like count, and many users have created their own fb fake user nets to gain advantage of the campaigns that these agencies provided. Just look at the http://www.freelancer.com/jobs/Facebook/ http://www.freelancer.com/jobs/Facebook/. How do you think those jobs are possible otherwise? That being said, it doesn't work as well as it did in 2008-09, so I see this as news 2 years old.
Zenst 14y ago
Valid doubt as well as they did a little experiment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4238075 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4238075 Moral being, target your marketing in trusted markets and verify any feedback for validity and if you too find that flase people are comming as a result of the marketing, then it is perhaps time to ask for a refund. I'm sure even facebook don't want nor wish people to lie and cheat to give a false impression and in that they would be more than happy to refund your expences. Especialy as you are checking simple details that they should of picked up early on by them.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." - John Wanamaker
- jarek 14y ago
  Yeah, exactly. Anyone who reckons Facebook stats are bad should look at the TV ad market.
cinbun8 14y ago
Any ad network is susceptible to this sort of fraud. A group from China managed to amass large sums from Google ads until they were caught and shut down a year or two back (Techcrunch ran an article about this). I am sure there are some that still manage to do it successfully. The true value of a click is one that is quantifiable beyond likes. * How many users signed up because of the click with a valid email ? Captchas / honeypots can be used to filter spammers. * Of these users that signed up, how many are active ? * How many users bought the product as a result of the click ? etc You many need to drill down deeper to avoid some layers of spam users. But yeah, the way the value is measured should not stop with how many users 'liked' a product. It needs to go deeper.
- James2k 14y ago
  Agreed and Facebook does a better job than most to keep this to a minimum. If you take any time whatsoever on an ad you can reduce this further by ommitting developing countries. A valid like is more valuable than other ad goals because conversions can receive future messages from the advertiser for free. Disagree with most of the article.
  - justinschuh 14y ago
    The irony here is that the above user was created five minutes before the comment was posted.
mootothemax 14y ago
I've heard one reason for knowingly buying fake fans is so that you can claim a vanity url - e.g. http://facebook.com/my_company http://facebook.com/my_company . Strange, as I think you only need 20 "likes", but when I see offers on fiverr to give 100 likes for $5, it starts making sense to me.
- fooandbarify 14y ago
  Like all things Facebook I'm sure it wasn't always this way (and won't always be), but these days you can claim any Facebook URL you want for a new page if it isn't already taken, regardless of "Likes".
netcan 14y ago
I'm an advertiser and have been in buying online ads for about 6 years. I'm disappointed with Facebook. It's not directly about roi or fraud or anything like that, not fundamentally (though obviously no one will advertise long term with a poor roi). It's more about vision. Adwords & Overture had some sort of vision about advertising online so do lots of (mostly unsuccessful upstarts). I really do think that with all of their problems they did a great job. Adwords is a great ad platform. It's more meritocratic. Scales down nicely for small/local businesses and is genuinely useful to the people seeing/clicking the ads. Facebook on the other hand seems content to ride the buzz of companies keen to figure out this new medium. They don't seem to be taking advantage of it to implement some solid idea. It seems like they have no interesting ideas about how their contribution to the communication-entertainment-advertising ecosystem looks. They don't really seem to understand themselves how/why/what their system (which is inevitably a new kind of advertising) is supposed to be working. The @facebook email address mess is a kind of analogy. Think you can improve on email/communication? Great. We need it. Think Facebook is a unique position to do so? Great. I agree (at least for some people). Figure out a way of doing it that people want. Don't trick people into something that feels like its for the company instead of the consumer.
- dasil003 14y ago
  It's because “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”
  - wutbrodo 14y ago
    The problem there is that they don't seem to be intent on building better services either. It's been a while now that they've had incredible resources to work with: top-tier tech talent, a captive audience of unprecedented scale, etc. And (possibly excluding timeline), they've done absolutely nothing interesting with their product. The argument that they're bad at monetizing because they're focusing their energies on improving their product is a bit hard to swallow given that their product hasn't really improved (or at the very least, does so at a glacial pace).
tatsuke95 14y ago
>"Earlier this year Facebook revealed that about 5-6% of its 901 million users might be fake - representing up to 54 million profiles." I've been singing this tune for a bit. In my experience, this is a big problem. If Facebook is saying this is the actual number, then consider is much higher. Facebook, as well as every player in their ecosystem, is economically incentivized to inflate the usage numbers. It's why Facebook is "worth" what it's worth, and how every single application on the platform is measured for investment. Games are literally ranked by their daily active users. I spent some time combing through the data of an oldish FB game (as an employee), with about 300k MAU and 150k DAU. We figured that about 40% of the accounts playing on our game daily were fake, created solely to take advantage of any mechanics where it was advantageous to have more friends. Some people would have 10 or more accounts. Now there are businesses sprouting up in countries where labour costs are cheap who sell "likes"; you can buy thousands for less than a hundred bucks. Mostly fake accounts. And this is only the blatantly fake accounts. What about the people who actively, honestly use Facebook, but have lied about minor details that are important to advertisers? Things like their age, sex, name, jobs, location, whatever? I did this myself. And yet, the value of the advertising (and Facebook directly) is derived from these measures. >"One, going by the name Agung Pratama Sevenfoldism, showed his date of birth as 1997 and said he had been a manager at Chevron in 2010. >Mr Tinmouth said this seemed "unlikely". I'd say.
- qq66 14y ago
  Even if half of Facebook profiles are fake, that's still 500 million users -- hard for an advertiser to ignore.
throwaway032496 14y ago
I was asked to look into some of the data from the BBC Correspondent's site earlier this week and was made an administrator to do so. I'm a member here, but am using a throwaway ID - because I'm sure there'll be a backlash to what I am going to reveal. Now I want to state for the record, I actually like Facebook, I don't have an axe to grind, and I really believe that MZ's intentions are truly honorable. I would like to believe he knows nothing about this, but I'm not naïve - he owns 57%, and he's a very very clever man. But I am disappointed. So to explain... Because the BBC has a wide non-tech audience some of what was found was not fully revealed mainly because it's so difficult to explain to the general public the tech behind this issues raised. The main point was missed both by TechCrunch, and many commentators on Twitter etc. and I guess general fans of Facebook. The point being that at first the ads were targeted to UK and US people. Hardly any clicks were reported meaning that advertising with this targeted criteria is pointless, and in fact more pointless than expanding the reach to countries that will artificially boost your return. The clicks/likes though high in number will never bear fruit, that much is not disputed by the BBC. But it begs the question if both "settings" are useless then what's the point in spending any money at all with Facebook? Before I get a barrage of hate mail remember I had access to the real data. The BBC describes exactly how you can replicate the experiment for yourself, and I guarantee you'll find the same results. What's more you'll discover the same profiles are liking your fake page the same as they liked the BBCs virtualbagel. Take it from me. What's more the list of Likers contained people who appear to spend their lives clicking likes. These people are clicking between 50-100 likes per day, all day, every day. In the 10 or so days in July many had racked up literally 300-1500 clicks. It doesn't take a genius to work out these people are being paid to click on ads. Remember we're talking third world countries where it makes economic sense to pay someone a-dollar-a-day to click on ads all day, when the return is so massive. The question is who is paying? Who really stands to benefit? Logically it just can't be a third party. This is out-and-out click-fraud. In addition to all this, and I can't reveal too much (because it's still being investigated for later publication) is that there appears to be evidence that the process is also subject to some automation from within Facebook. We have comparative evidence that shows how click automation would look if it was carried out by a third party and how it would look if it was carried out inside Facebook. Unfortunately for Facebook the evidence is showing that again it's driven from the inside. I'm actually quite sad, because it doesn't have to be this way, but from what I have analysed it is, what it is. If you don't believe me do the same exercise and look at the data.

47 points by molecule 14y ago

Seems like this will always be the case since social media isn't tangible anyways.

I don't care if 50% of Facebook profiles are fake as long as the long-term ROI of the advertising is positive. Measure the impact on actual goals, not intermediates like number of likes. Facebook's worked for me; I've been advertising there consistently for about a year now. http://i.imgur.com/r0RQ5.png http://i.imgur.com/r0RQ5.png As far as disproportionate responses from the Phillippines and Egypt, if you don't limit the audience you show your ad to, you're gonna get bad results everywhere, not just Facebook.

dsirijus 14y ago
I completely agree with your statement, but the problem with current state of affairs is that just plain Like number counts towards brand awareness, and many clients of agencies providing Facebook advertising don't come there for basically any measurable ROI 'cept building brand on the platform, which is, imho, the best Facebook can provide as far as advertising goes.
barrkel 14y ago
It's not enough to measure the ROI on the advertising; the ROI needs to be higher than the alternatives. In other words, are you considering opportunity cost?
- dangrossman 14y ago
  That makes little sense. Placing new advertising takes almost no time at all. It's not like you need to consult the design department; your only creative on Facebook is 100 characters of text. One employee can create dozens of new placements each day. You advertise everywhere that's effective at the same time, not just the single most effective place.

nmridul 14y ago

Nothing surprising. Just visit Fiverr.com and you can buy 100+ facebook likes for $5. And you will get likes from US, UK too.

wiradikusuma 14y ago

What is the incentive for those bots to like/click the ads? The stakeholders are (1) Facebook users (might be fake/bots) who like/click ads (2) Facebook (3) Companies promoting their product in FB (4) Agencies which put the ads on company behalf. (2) and (4) have the monetary incentive.

nbm 14y ago
It could also be criminal groups that are trying to make their profiles appear less fake. I worked with the team that fight spam, scams, and the fake accounts that distribute them when I started at Facebook, and they expend a lot of time writing code and building machine learning models to detect fake accounts. There would be no fake accounts if there wasn't a massive financial upside to it, and so they do the strangest things to try avoid the detection. You can read a bit about what the team does at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ldg/a10-stein.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ldg/a10-stein.p...
throwaway032496 14y ago
To add a bit more into your information the appearance of ads from the end user perspective is random (3) and (4) could not be done automatically, because you'd have to know the exact moment the relevant ad was to appear. Serving the ads is automated à la Google auction technique so unpredictable. The only way to spoof that is to expand the targeted audience. The automated ad clicks that I refer to is demonstrated by a gaping hole in the data consistency, which would not otherwise occur if the action was taking place outside of Facebook's own servers.

andys627 14y ago

Crappy title - should focus on issue of likes from fake accounts, not value of any like

dsirijus 14y ago

Most of the Facebook agencies did their own inflation of Pages like count, and many users have created their own fb fake user nets to gain advantage of the campaigns that these agencies provided. Just look at the http://www.freelancer.com/jobs/Facebook/ http://www.freelancer.com/jobs/Facebook/. How do you think those jobs are possible otherwise? That being said, it doesn't work as well as it did in 2008-09, so I see this as news 2 years old.

Zenst 14y ago

Valid doubt as well as they did a little experiment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4238075 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4238075 Moral being, target your marketing in trusted markets and verify any feedback for validity and if you too find that flase people are comming as a result of the marketing, then it is perhaps time to ask for a refund. I'm sure even facebook don't want nor wish people to lie and cheat to give a false impression and in that they would be more than happy to refund your expences. Especialy as you are checking simple details that they should of picked up early on by them.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." - John Wanamaker

jarek 14y ago
Yeah, exactly. Anyone who reckons Facebook stats are bad should look at the TV ad market.

cinbun8 14y ago

Any ad network is susceptible to this sort of fraud. A group from China managed to amass large sums from Google ads until they were caught and shut down a year or two back (Techcrunch ran an article about this). I am sure there are some that still manage to do it successfully. The true value of a click is one that is quantifiable beyond likes. * How many users signed up because of the click with a valid email ? Captchas / honeypots can be used to filter spammers. * Of these users that signed up, how many are active ? * How many users bought the product as a result of the click ? etc You many need to drill down deeper to avoid some layers of spam users. But yeah, the way the value is measured should not stop with how many users 'liked' a product. It needs to go deeper.

James2k 14y ago
Agreed and Facebook does a better job than most to keep this to a minimum. If you take any time whatsoever on an ad you can reduce this further by ommitting developing countries. A valid like is more valuable than other ad goals because conversions can receive future messages from the advertiser for free. Disagree with most of the article.
- justinschuh 14y ago
  The irony here is that the above user was created five minutes before the comment was posted.

mootothemax 14y ago

I've heard one reason for knowingly buying fake fans is so that you can claim a vanity url - e.g. http://facebook.com/my_company http://facebook.com/my_company . Strange, as I think you only need 20 "likes", but when I see offers on fiverr to give 100 likes for $5, it starts making sense to me.

fooandbarify 14y ago
Like all things Facebook I'm sure it wasn't always this way (and won't always be), but these days you can claim any Facebook URL you want for a new page if it isn't already taken, regardless of "Likes".

netcan 14y ago

I'm an advertiser and have been in buying online ads for about 6 years. I'm disappointed with Facebook. It's not directly about roi or fraud or anything like that, not fundamentally (though obviously no one will advertise long term with a poor roi). It's more about vision. Adwords & Overture had some sort of vision about advertising online so do lots of (mostly unsuccessful upstarts). I really do think that with all of their problems they did a great job. Adwords is a great ad platform. It's more meritocratic. Scales down nicely for small/local businesses and is genuinely useful to the people seeing/clicking the ads. Facebook on the other hand seems content to ride the buzz of companies keen to figure out this new medium. They don't seem to be taking advantage of it to implement some solid idea. It seems like they have no interesting ideas about how their contribution to the communication-entertainment-advertising ecosystem looks. They don't really seem to understand themselves how/why/what their system (which is inevitably a new kind of advertising) is supposed to be working. The @facebook email address mess is a kind of analogy. Think you can improve on email/communication? Great. We need it. Think Facebook is a unique position to do so? Great. I agree (at least for some people). Figure out a way of doing it that people want. Don't trick people into something that feels like its for the company instead of the consumer.

dasil003 14y ago
It's because “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”
- wutbrodo 14y ago
  The problem there is that they don't seem to be intent on building better services either. It's been a while now that they've had incredible resources to work with: top-tier tech talent, a captive audience of unprecedented scale, etc. And (possibly excluding timeline), they've done absolutely nothing interesting with their product. The argument that they're bad at monetizing because they're focusing their energies on improving their product is a bit hard to swallow given that their product hasn't really improved (or at the very least, does so at a glacial pace).

tatsuke95 14y ago

>"Earlier this year Facebook revealed that about 5-6% of its 901 million users might be fake - representing up to 54 million profiles." I've been singing this tune for a bit. In my experience, this is a big problem. If Facebook is saying this is the actual number, then consider is much higher. Facebook, as well as every player in their ecosystem, is economically incentivized to inflate the usage numbers. It's why Facebook is "worth" what it's worth, and how every single application on the platform is measured for investment. Games are literally ranked by their daily active users. I spent some time combing through the data of an oldish FB game (as an employee), with about 300k MAU and 150k DAU. We figured that about 40% of the accounts playing on our game daily were fake, created solely to take advantage of any mechanics where it was advantageous to have more friends. Some people would have 10 or more accounts. Now there are businesses sprouting up in countries where labour costs are cheap who sell "likes"; you can buy thousands for less than a hundred bucks. Mostly fake accounts. And this is only the blatantly fake accounts. What about the people who actively, honestly use Facebook, but have lied about minor details that are important to advertisers? Things like their age, sex, name, jobs, location, whatever? I did this myself. And yet, the value of the advertising (and Facebook directly) is derived from these measures. >"One, going by the name Agung Pratama Sevenfoldism, showed his date of birth as 1997 and said he had been a manager at Chevron in 2010. >Mr Tinmouth said this seemed "unlikely". I'd say.

qq66 14y ago
Even if half of Facebook profiles are fake, that's still 500 million users -- hard for an advertiser to ignore.

throwaway032496 14y ago

I was asked to look into some of the data from the BBC Correspondent's site earlier this week and was made an administrator to do so. I'm a member here, but am using a throwaway ID - because I'm sure there'll be a backlash to what I am going to reveal. Now I want to state for the record, I actually like Facebook, I don't have an axe to grind, and I really believe that MZ's intentions are truly honorable. I would like to believe he knows nothing about this, but I'm not naïve - he owns 57%, and he's a very very clever man. But I am disappointed. So to explain... Because the BBC has a wide non-tech audience some of what was found was not fully revealed mainly because it's so difficult to explain to the general public the tech behind this issues raised. The main point was missed both by TechCrunch, and many commentators on Twitter etc. and I guess general fans of Facebook. The point being that at first the ads were targeted to UK and US people. Hardly any clicks were reported meaning that advertising with this targeted criteria is pointless, and in fact more pointless than expanding the reach to countries that will artificially boost your return. The clicks/likes though high in number will never bear fruit, that much is not disputed by the BBC. But it begs the question if both "settings" are useless then what's the point in spending any money at all with Facebook? Before I get a barrage of hate mail remember I had access to the real data. The BBC describes exactly how you can replicate the experiment for yourself, and I guarantee you'll find the same results. What's more you'll discover the same profiles are liking your fake page the same as they liked the BBCs virtualbagel. Take it from me. What's more the list of Likers contained people who appear to spend their lives clicking likes. These people are clicking between 50-100 likes per day, all day, every day. In the 10 or so days in July many had racked up literally 300-1500 clicks. It doesn't take a genius to work out these people are being paid to click on ads. Remember we're talking third world countries where it makes economic sense to pay someone a-dollar-a-day to click on ads all day, when the return is so massive. The question is who is paying? Who really stands to benefit? Logically it just can't be a third party. This is out-and-out click-fraud. In addition to all this, and I can't reveal too much (because it's still being investigated for later publication) is that there appears to be evidence that the process is also subject to some automation from within Facebook. We have comparative evidence that shows how click automation would look if it was carried out by a third party and how it would look if it was carried out inside Facebook. Unfortunately for Facebook the evidence is showing that again it's driven from the inside. I'm actually quite sad, because it doesn't have to be this way, but from what I have analysed it is, what it is. If you don't believe me do the same exercise and look at the data.