26 ms·

Facebook Fraud [video]

• gfodor 13y ago
  look, someone just discovered the concept of click fraud. getting ROI on FB is hard but not impossible. driving mobile app installs with good targeting at a reasonable price can be done. i can't speak to likes but i have to imagine with good targeting and a reasonable understanding of the dynamics of click fraud that for the right domain you can get your money's worth.
• ishener 13y ago
  i wonder if promoting posts also lead to fake/false exposure
• nonsequ 13y ago
  I'm interested in learning more about this. Does anybody have any thoughts? I think that, by intentionally posting unlikeable things, he guarantees himself 100% spam likes. On something that's actually likeable, these spam likes might be contained to a reasonably small proportion of likes. But what is the size of this shadow population of click farm users on Facebook? For these countries with large click farms to be the largest contingent of likes on big pages like David Beckham suggests they are not small enough to be manageable... I also don't know Facebook's revenue distribution well enough to gauge the business implications. Is it tilted towards small businesses that have serious trouble weeding out spam? Or is it concentrated with the large corporations that can garner large enough real audiences to ignore the spam?
  • 345723 13y ago
    I've worked on all sides of this: brand, agency, buying likes, selling likes, etc. The reality is this: everything in this video is 100% true and it's been this way almost since the beginning. But most marketers are just checking a box. No one really cares about the budget spent on social ads. It's a line item next to display and TV. I should say, this isn't just true with Facebook. The same thing happens on Twitter and YouTube. Google AdSense its he only platform that even attempts to sniff out fraud. No one else even tries, because no one cares.
    • AznHisoka 13y ago
      I love the BS that Twitter tells you about the ROI of their ads. "70% of people who follow you will buy from you".. DUH... That's because the people who follow you are for the most part your EXISTING customers. The other 30% of course are bots.
    • tmarthal 13y ago
      The Google engineers are also trying to release their methods. This is not detecting 'fraudulent' activity, but rather trying to classify adversarial advertisements: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub37195.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub37195.html (pdf is linked there). You can assume that they are doing the same types of thing to classify fraud.
• nayefc 13y ago
  Twitter ads are pretty much the same. Never pay for ads for Twitter and Facebook. More than 98% of what you pay for goes to fraud followers.
  • dclara 13y ago
    We need better solution.
    • joeblau 13y ago
      Pay for quality products.
      • dclara 13y ago
        "Never pay for ads for Twitter and Facebook." and " Pay for quality products." Do you mean pay better website to get your products listed?
      • nayefc 13y ago
        It's not about quality of products. See the other reply. Without ads, there will be no Facebook or Twitter. The issue with fraud is a very serious and difficult one that creeps into many industries, and ends up sucking the life out of them (hint: check banking or finance!).
        • dclara 13y ago
          FB can still put ads on users timeline pages, like Twitter inserts ads in between the tweets. But this kind of fraud is a big harm to the social network ecosystem.
          • nayefc 13y ago
            Putting ads on the users timeline pages may not decrease fraud. The fraud issue is not where you put the ad at.
• kzrdude 13y ago
  Be sure to watch through to the end for the conclusion! I'll summarise: Click farms like every page they can, far more than just the pages they were paid to like; the theory is that they will evade detection this way. Paying for "legitimate" facebook exposure will expose you to the click farms as well, and that will be the absolute majority of your gained likes. In this way facebook ads give a huge, but useless, gain in "Likes".
  • lingben 13y ago
    Actually there is a fundamental reason why you're exposed to click farms: because fb exposes your ad to a small sample size of your audience first. Then based on the engagement the ad receives, it will target it more to those 'types' of people. Since click farms are far far more engaged than the average fb user, this means that invariably, your ad will be steered actively by fb towards click farms! So if you pay for fb ads you are in effect wasting your money because fb is forcing your ad to be shown to those who shouldn't see your ads. And if you don't pay either for legitimate or fraudulent likes, you will still get a large fake following because they are using you to disguise their activity.
    • dclara 13y ago
      Looks like it's hard to get rid of the click farms and FB is using it for revenue. And it could be worse that most of the Likes are fake.
  • deleted 13y ago
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  • capkutay 13y ago
    I doubt there's any trivial solutions to this, but one simple scenario would be to limit the amount of 'likes' an account can have..but that could also cause FB to implode.
    • haffi112 13y ago
      Well, there is one solution which wasn't mentioned in the video, get the bots to like your posts so they get visibility leading to actual users seeing them.
• lingben 13y ago
  If you haven't yet watched Derek's earlier video about "the problem with facebook", you should: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g because in it he lays bare several fundamental structural issues about facebook which 99% people don't realize. Well worth the watch. Unless fb changes drastically, it will die a surprisingly fast death.
  • serg_chernata 13y ago
    Thanks for sharing that!
    • mentos 13y ago
      Yes thanks for that, I've got a much better understanding now of the roles of the the creator, consumer, advertiser inside Facebook and he makes a good comparison/contrast to YouTube.
  • bhartzer 13y ago
    And Facebook's valuation will disappear equally as fast.
    • taigeair 13y ago
      But then again, there were many alternative search engines but not many alternative social networks.
      • phreeza 13y ago
        huh? I do not understand what you are saying, care to explain?
        • hackinthebochs 13y ago
          Google had to be good because there was competition in the search space. Facebook doesn't have to be good because they're the only viable social network.
• lmg643 13y ago
  can anyone from facebook comment on this? I have a hard time believing the company can hit $7.8bn in revenue per year and have this being more than an insignificant fractional percentage of the total revenue. surely major customers would have noticed by now and reduced their spend.
  • kzrdude 13y ago
    WP wrote about this story, and there was an inadequate response from facebook http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/02/10/this-blogger-paid-facebook-to-promote-his-page-he-got-80000-bogus-likes-instead/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/02/10...
• acangiano 13y ago
  This is well known among savvy internet marketers. It's great to see someone exposing it so well for the laymen and denouncing the issue at large.
  • serg_chernata 13y ago
    Understanding that the system is flawed was fairly simple but this video really laid it out well piece by piece. Easy to absorb, well done.
• wzy 13y ago
  And here i was considering what advice i should give a client on whether or not to purchase facebook ads. I want to say i am shocked but these days i am way to cynical about the ins and outs of SEO/Inbound marketing. It's all a rat race
• kpao 13y ago
  We learned this last year when we started paying for ads on Facebook. Our app is in a niche market (Flight Simulator for mobile devices), I assumed that very little people would click, but we saw a constant increase of about 1K likes/day. After looking at the analytics, I decided to cut Brazil and India. We had a huge disconnect between our App Store country data and those ads, and we also saw no noticeable change in our sales figures. The accounts also were random like the one in the OP video, a Indian teenage girl liking a Flight Simulator? Why not... Hundreds? nope... I feel like I've been cheated by Facebook in a way and would like my money back. They sure can find a way to figure out if those clicks are legitimate. Someone has 3K likes of random interests? That's a red flag to me.
  • dclara 13y ago
    Soon more businesses will find that the Likes does not help their online marketing at all. This is a major SEO problem that most of the businesses are hunting for. Can we find some other ways to resolved it? http://bit.ly/LRSdkJ http://bit.ly/LRSdkJ
    • igravious 13y ago
      Why should I click some random URL shortened link no matter how enticing you think the lead in is?
      • dclara 13y ago
        Good point. I thought the question leading the link means there is some possible solution for it. Another reason is that I don't want to have a long URL to block people from reading. This last one is for tracking on bitly. I'll put the complete url in the future posts. Here it is: http://bingobo.info/blog/bingobo/how-bingobo-can-help-business-solve-their-seo-problems.jsp http://bingobo.info/blog/bingobo/how-bingobo-can-help-busine...
  • KaoruAoiShiho 13y ago
    It shouldn't matter if ads are priced on the basis of ROI instead of per-user (which it is). The ads are only as cheap as they are because they're being farmed, if they weren't they would be much more expensive.
• deleted 13y ago
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• debt 13y ago
  Here we go again. It's a new quarter. Now that earnings decimated the young-people-dont-use-facebook myth, now we have the click-fraud-is-a huge-systemic-problem myth. Haters be hatin.
  • pmr_ 13y ago
    This video does not seem like hate to me. The guy starts by how he tried to increase Facebook likes through legitimate Facebook endorsed advertisement and shows the data how that worked out for him. Of course, the data he uses is rather thin, but he makes a good point.
    • debt 13y ago
      Google had a click fraud issue before and they fixed it. Facebook will throw every appropriate resource on this problem and it'll be fixed. I am absolutely positive this is just noise.
    • raymondduke 13y ago
      He used the endorsement poorly. He does a way better job at putting on a show than providing a convincing argument.
  • ksk 13y ago
    What factual errors did this video make?
• linux_devil 13y ago
  There are lots of such activities still floating around, its not the likes which matters , its the people talking about which matters , and relevant comments .
• knownhuman 13y ago
  I went through a similar experience with a client - purchased targeted ads and got immediate likes. However, those likes turned into an albatross and engagement went through the floor. And the crux of the problem wasn't that engagement dropped, it was that for this particular client "Likes" were deemed as more valuable than actual engagement. This belief that a Like is the most important conversion Facebook has to offer is something that repeatedly encountered, and one that drives me a little batty.
• deleted 13y ago
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• thinkcomp 13y ago
  When I moved to Silicon Valley in 2006, I had just lived through the events that were eventually twisted into the movie The Social Network. My conclusion having witnessed Mark's behavior firsthand was that he was the least trustworthy individual I had ever met and that he was likely to harm others. At the risk of sounding like Chicken Little ("the sky is falling!") I wrote a great deal voicing my point of view, including my very first post on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24742), in which I called Mark a fraud. For expressing my grave and sincere concern, I was met with what could only be described as considerable hostility. Aware that very few wanted to hear what I had to say, I did everything I could to move onto more interesting and useful work. I don't spend my time worrying about Facebook, so I haven't looked into their ad technology in any depth. Nonetheless, everything in the above video strikes me as spot on, which would also mean that I was exactly right. Facebook's entire valuation appears to be based on little more than false advertising and click farming. As the CEO of a publicly-traded corporation with a supposed market capitalization of $162.61 billion, Mark would still appear to be, as I described here (http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=80 http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=80), the greatest con of all time. I hope that based on these findings Facebook finds itself the target of civil actions filed by multiple Attorneys-General and the DOJ, but I doubt very much that our justice system would render a fair outcome even then.
  • onedev 13y ago
    Sounds like you're a little bitter.
  • memracom 13y ago
    Without judging whether he is right or not, I'd just like to point out that IF he is right he would fill the same role as Nassim Nicholas Taleb in the Banking Collapse of 2008 and the role of Harry Markopolis in the Bernie Madoff pyramid scheme. So there is ample precedence for this being a correct assesment and if you have read anything surrounding the Madoff controversy and the banking collapse, you will know that the NY financial scene is riddled with incompetence and corruption. It is entirely possibility that Facebook is the biggest stock market fraud in history.
  • 13y ago
• drawkbox 13y ago
  Well done video and yes this is a problem. But except for the possible hit on how it distributes engagement to the graph, most people will never complain about fake likes, so it will go on. Facebook will adjust to allow for fake likes to not hit engagement and it will go away. However I think they need to add a modifier to regions. Likes count as a like but overall engagement should be less equal from bot farm areas. A bit like an electoral college or aggregated country value based on fraud/fakes. In the end advertising is always a small conversion rate and is very thin online so tricks to kick up visibility will always be around on every ad system.
  • dclara 13y ago
    "Facebook will adjust to allow for fake likes to not hit engagement and it will go away." How? Now the problem OP brought up is: if he got too many fake likes, his posts are not being delivered to his organic followers. This cause a major damage for his intention to post, and he is forced to advertise his posts which is ridiculous. I think there should be some better model to distinguish the organic from the click farms. Here is a proposal: http://bit.ly/LRSdkJ http://bit.ly/LRSdkJ
• leoplct 13y ago
  FB stock is losing -1.21%
• blumkvist 13y ago
  I like how a bunch of programmers, mom&pop bakeries and nerd youtubers who have absolutely 0 experience in marketing/advertising expect to throw $50 on facebook and see astonishing results and ROI. Guess what? Marketing is a difficult discipline. Pick up a book on communications and a couple more on copywriting and advertising. Then another one on marketing. Do a demographic/psychographic profile, read a ton of whitepapers and case studies. Then map out your strategy, load your account with money and test, test, test. You are going vastly unprepared in a space filled with people who do this for living and expect to compete with them. When you fail after your pitiful attempt, you blame someone. Human nature at its best.
  • thattallguy 13y ago
    First, you sound like a real champ, so thanks for making it hard for me to reply and support your point. But I will, Test, Test, Test and don't be a noob is the key to making any paid channel work. The deck is stacked against anyone who doesn't. The problem I see is that Facebook is banking naiveté and unsophisticated users to bolster their short term revenue. Is that right or wrong? Maybe. Will it have long ranging impacts on the platform and the small businesses that could really be benefiting from social channels, probably. Test Test Test and don't be a noob.
    • commandar 13y ago
      >The problem I see is that Facebook is banking naiveté and unsophisticated users to bolster their short term revenue. This, exactly. It's perfectly okay that marketing is hard and return on investment is also difficult. The problem is Facebook actively pursues unsophisticated advertisers while running a platform that's actively harmful to them. I see it analogous to SEO. Good SEO being hard is fine. There are noob mistakes you can make that will hurt your SERP placing. That's okay, too. But if AdWords worked such that paying for AdWords actively hurt your SERP positioning, I think people would have the same kind of problem with it that they do with this.
      • thattallguy 13y ago
• TeMPOraL 13y ago
  I have my pet theory. I'm yet to find significant evidence for or against it, but it's what my hunch tells me. The theory goes like this: All on-line ads are mostly worthless - most clicks are from clickfarms, and the genuine parts are mostly by clickjacking or accidental misclicks. Almost no one really wants to buy stuff via ads. Ad agencies keep telling companies that advertising online will generate lots of revenue, but between all those messy, noisy metrics and people generally not understanding a thing about statistics it's hard to see what part of revenue can be really attributed to ads, and whether or not they're worth the money invested.
  • hayksaakian 13y ago
    While there is a lot of fraud, if you actually track from ad click to sale, you'll see SOME amount of results. In most cases they will be underwhelming, but if the numbers make sense, why not? example: 2$ per click for a $500 dollar product (assume no other costs_ if you can turn 1 out of 100 clicks into a sale, then it might still be worth it, despite 99 fake, uninterested, botted, clickfarmed or otherwise undesirable clicks.
    • Sheepshow 13y ago
      If you can completely obliterate your margin like that just to make a single sale, I suspect prices are too high and you'd end up doing better by just offering the product at $400.
  • anatari 13y ago
    This is absurd. While I'm sure there is a lot of fraudulent activity and rubbish ad networks (IE Facebook likes, as claimed by the article), traditional online ads are pretty trivial to track at this point for a business that can complete transactions online. If you run a web store, you can track exactly how much sales you get from a particular ad channel and weigh it against the advertising cost by simply creating a unique link for each channel, or using any of the many available ad analytics platforms out there. Entire multi-million/billion dollar businesses are built around arbitraging this opportunity positively, particularly on Google. Things like Facebook Likes are more difficult to track and are still relatively new, and that's why many people haven't figured them out yet, but over time they will either reach an equilibrium, where value provided is equal to cost or they will disappear.
• fuzzywalrus 13y ago
  Good video except for the love everything, mono your voice track. Every-time the speaker turns his head, the audio pans to the right. Its annoying with headphones.
• j_s 13y ago
  Can Facebook ads be targeted at users with less than a certain number of likes?
  • pcurve 13y ago
    That will encourage click farms to just create more bogus accounts.
    • dclara 13y ago
      Is it possible to prevent them from creating bogus accounts? From our website, accessing to user accounts are protected by cookies. If the request is not being sent from the same browser, the next page will be not accessible. It's an experiment now.
    • bambax 13y ago
      You could target ads to accounts that have less than x likes AND are more than y years old.
      • pcurve 13y ago
        That might work short term, but it still won't prevent click farms from hoarding new accounts, and letting them 'mature'. Hopefully advertisers will become more savvy and stop paying for these broken metrics.
  • JacobJans 13y ago
    I think this gets to the fundamental problem with buying likes: You're competing with all the other pages the user has liked. The value of a like depends on this -- and it should definitely be factored into the price you pay. Hopefully this will happen some time in the future!
    • hayksaakian 13y ago
      that might just be the best solution to this problem. weigh based on the value of one like among however many a given user has
• mullingitover 13y ago
  I found a way to dramatically improve facebook. Around the beginning of the year I unfollowed every single friend and page, so my newsfeed is completely empty. Now when I want to know what my friends are up to, I go check out their pages, essentially going from a push feed to a pull. It gets me out of the empty crack addiction-esque cycle of going to the news feed and being disappointed/bored with the lives of my friends, and instead lets me focus on what facebook is actually valuable for: party planning.
  • colinbartlett 13y ago
    My solution was to delete my Facebook account. Now, I engage with the people I care about via mechanisms that are far more meaningful: emails, phone calls, a coffee, a lunch.
    • eyeareque 13y ago
      I did the same and now I'm able to focus and spend time on real friendships that matter vs. clicking through a facebook feed of what facebook decides to show me.
      • CatMtKing 13y ago
        I don't have any reason to delete it. I get messages every so often from friends that are in town, and it makes it easier to host and plan a gathering. It also makes sharing photos among friends easy. I waste way more time on social media sites like this one than I ever have on Facebook.
    • baby 13y ago
      I really wish I could do that. I used to ask a friend to change my password, now I use www.offsocialnetwork.com to do it (I'm doing it this week). But I can't go really long without facebook since all is planned from there, the parties, the social events, the foreign friends visiting my city, foreign friends keeping in touch with me... I guess it's easier not to have facebook when you didn't travel a lot and don't have a big social life.
• tharri 13y ago
  I don't understand. If I only advertise in the U.S., why would click farms in Egypt see my ads (and subsequently like my page to avoid detection)?
  • lingben 13y ago
    Off the top of my head, two ways: using proxies and having the fake account artificially listed as having an address or location in the US while the actual owner is not in the US.
• quadrangle 13y ago
  The ad-based revenue model is fundamentally broken. Everyone needs to run Adblock and we need to figure out an economy that doesn't rely on this garbage.
  • duncanawoods 13y ago
    Man I love AdBlock. I used it today to block "Hot Network Questions" on StackOverflow. The click-bait trivia was driving me nuts. I'm there to work and hated being distracted by that crap. Two clicks and ahhhh, much better.
  • mikeg8 13y ago
    Adblock is my favorite thing right now, I don't know why I didn't install it sooner. And I couldn't agree more on finding new ways to generate money for the online economy. Advertisement is so boring and old-school.
  • rhizome 13y ago
    Just online, or in general? Has it been broken for years, decades or centuries?
    • onedev 13y ago
      I think the newer generations who grew up online tend to be oblivious to Ads. It's just an instinct to ignore them.
      • tzs 13y ago
        More likely they THINK they are oblivious to them, but they are not. I recall (sorry, I have no citation) a survey of people who played the California state lottery that asked people if they had paid attention to any of the state's ads for the lottery. They also asked the people why they played the lottery. A very large fraction of the people who said they had not noticed the ads repeated slogans and tag lines from the ads when explaining why they played.
        • 13y ago
• taylorlb 13y ago
  There should be an option for page owners to clean their likes based on engagement if they want to.
• deleted 13y ago
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• phaer 13y ago
  Also interesting that "cairo-based" "Ahmed Ronaldo"s name is written in greek writing on his facebook page. That does not even look like a authentic, egyptian fake account
• notlisted 13y ago
  Nice video. All true. I have performed tests with the same ad budget ($20k) and target audience for Google and FB. FB ROI was negative. Google ROI was 400% (travel space). The only thing that seemingly "works" has been buying likes by advertising. This video should help educate my clients of the utter uselessness of those too. This brings up the interesting question of the general (non)value of a lot of mobile advertising. High impressions, super-low click rates, with many "falsies" because of tricks by the developer, eg where the advert is shown at random, quickly covering up parts of the user interface or extremely close to legitimate user interface elements. Case in point, the app "Reddit in Pictures" bounces its adverts up and down at the bottom of the screen. If the advert were static, you wouldn't make the mistake of clicking on them, however, due to the bounce it has happened to me at least 20 times in the past month. In short: for me the only valuable advert is a google advert... visible at the time when people have actually expressed interest in a topic/product, because they search for it. Note: google display network advertising is equally useless/fraudulent.
  • moocowduckquack 13y ago
    google display network advertising is equally useless/fraudulent It is very good at giving me pictures of the more expensive things that I have recently bought, should I suddenly need two.
    • notlisted 13y ago
      I meant it in the sense of "loads of impressions", very few clicks, lots of clicks from countries listed in the video, unless specifically excluded.
    • monkeyboysteve 13y ago
      I think the difference is that Google really tries to kill the click farms as apposed to the social media companies.
    • calbear81 13y ago
      It's kind of funny because Google really only controls the network of sites their ad spaces are on, the content of the ad you get is controlled by the advertiser or 3rd party ad tech provider. The retargeting ads you speak of (Criteo runs a lot of them) is generated automatically via these 3rd party ad platforms cookie combined with an API into the advertiser's store feed (product photo, description, price, etc.) They get a stream of SKUs that you've looked at and try to get you to pull the trigger. There's nothing to prevent the store from also associating items you've already bought so you don't get shown something that's irrelevant. My best guess is that it's just easier to not do that.
• downandout 13y ago
  There are reasons that only 6% of FB advertisers are profitable, and this highlights one of the major ones. Unfortunately Facebook has a serious disincentive to fix this - namely the loss of billions of dollars in market cap. As long as the river of cash keeps flowing, they won't make serious efforts at targeting these fake likes.
• JacobJans 13y ago
  I run profitable Facebook marketing campaigns. Here's the problem with this guy's argument: He expects people from Somalia to be as responsive to his content at people from the United States. That makes exactly zero sense. These aren't "likes", these are people. And the people from Somalia apparently don't like his content. But, according to his very own numbers, people from the United States are very responsive. Are fake likes the obvious answer? Or is he completely ignoring marketing fundamentals?
  • mikeg8 13y ago
    Please write an article about how you run these "profitable" campaigns. Seriously. It seems like you are the only person I've ever heard make this claim and I'm sure people here are dying to know the secret.
    • dangrossman 13y ago
      I've run many profitable campaigns on Facebook -- by not buying likes or advertising a Facebook Page. You can advertise normal links on Facebook and that operates like any other online ad -- some text and a picture, linked to a landing page for your own site. There's no "likes" to count or "engagement" to measure other than the normal conversion metrics -- how many of the clickthroughs completed whatever action you wanted them to complete on the landing page, how many eventually convert to paying customers, and is their LTV higher than their CPA. Facebook's also a great channel for retargeting. I run a campaign for Improvely there and the ads only appear to people that have already hit the signup page within the past few days.
      • AznHisoka 13y ago
        Sounds like that's the only viable way to have profitable campaigns: having ads that go directly to your landing page. I for one am confused as to why people chose the other indirect, convoluted way: buying likes, directing people to their FB page, THEN hoping they click through to their actual website.
        • 13y ago
• ChuckMcM 13y ago
  The challenge here is the misalignment of interests. I agree with lingben that if someone can create a social network with the reach of Facebook but a better alignment of its users and advertisers, it will kill Facebook dead. FWIW it makes an interesting way to evaluate Google+.
  • deleted 13y ago
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  • mbesto 13y ago
    It reminds me of the poorly aligned incentives of Yelp (and to be fair, all accreditation institutions)
• protomyth 13y ago
  Would it change anything about the problem if the initial distribution of a post would favor people with fewer overall likes and people who had previously engaged? It seems like a win for the poster, but a loss for Facebook since they wouldn't get more money for payment to promote the post.
  • rhizome 13y ago
    FB already has the money, why should they care about engagement? What is the value proposition for that if goodwill is not a primary driver? That is, is there any indication that FB isn't simply penny-wise and pound-foolish?
    • protomyth 13y ago
      I don't really expect Facebook to do anything since it seems like a profitable churn. I was more interested in the system as a whole and what small changes could correct it. It seems like a really weird, random sample taste makers thing right now.
• mschaecher 13y ago
  As someone who has helped massively grow a handful of businesses with Facebook being a significant channel, part of me wants to say "Yep, FB advertising is bunk. Everyone stop!" But in reality I'd be saying that in a weak attempt to make my own Facebook advertising more effective. Lemme tl;dr this in three bullets: - It's far easier for non-sophisticated advertisers to waste money. - The ad platform is pretty technical and nuanced - Notice I didn't mention facebook in the previous two bullets? That's because it's true for anywhere you buy ads, even print or flyers, radio or direct mail. So to reiterate: For any given paid advertising channel, it is far easier for non-sophisticated people to waste money as it is to see significant ROI. Any place you can buy ads is far more technical and nuanced than people who don't live and breath it could every imagine.
  • moocowduckquack 13y ago
    So given that, to see significant ROI you need to find genuine experts in how to use each form of media. So, even if it is technically possible to do well in a given media, if it is really hard to identify who is a genuine expert in that media due to it being new and full of snake-oil merchants, then you are likely to do better in a more established field.
    • mschaecher 13y ago
      You're correct that there certainly a lot of snake-oil merchants out there. But they're not just limited "new" media channels. Just as many slimeballs in the traditional world. I'm going to get crucified for this, but paid advertising is somewhat analogous to software engineering/developers. There are many languages/platforms/technologies out there. Some old, some cutting edge. Each one most likely has it's own syntax/terminology, patterns, approaches etc. So when hiring a full stack engineer, you look for someone who cuts pretty deep across a few key areas, but can also roll up their sleeves across the stack if need be. Example: Ruby Expert, Getting into Angular, and knows how to provision AWS if need be. Same thing with full stack marketer. If you know Google Adwords, Content Marketing and a bit of PR are your core, then optimize your hire for that.
    • yaur 13y ago
• tlogan 13y ago
  Good video and but nothing new. One workaround is to create custom audience based on emails you have. That helps a little. And I would like to point out that he might be wrong about engagement of "fake like" audience. Some farms will give you fakes which are very much engaged (I guess to prevent detection of fakeness). The most interesting thing is to see whether Facebook will do something about this. On one side, this definitely helps their bottom line. On the other hand, it erodes usefulness of Facebook as an ad platform.
• doubt_me 13y ago
  Now people understand why G+ wants real names? Still doesn't stop the fake accounts but at the same time it pretty much patches it. I think
  • ceejayoz 13y ago
    It'd take about five minutes to take the top 500 first and last baby names and write a script to generate fake names with combinations of them, adding a suffix every once in a while.
  • pjc50 13y ago
    You can easily enough come up with a million "real" names for your fake profiles. Meanwhile G+ penalises people with genuine but surprising names.
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• smaddali 13y ago
  Having worked on Fraud Detection and Risk Management at eBay previously, I can understand the difficulty in solving this. As it was explained in the video, the fraudsters will want to look like the regular folks as much as possible. I think this is solvable problem. I will not post the features here, My guess FB folks already know how to address this specific aspect of Fraud. Btw, has anyone had better experience/ROI with FB Mobile app installs ?? How is the effectiveness of those Ads ?
  • chid 13y ago
    Why would anyone even hire the fraudsters? (Once they understand they're buying 'Likes' which reduce their reach due to lower engagement)
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• jokoon 13y ago
  This makes me hate the web. I like the internet, but facebook infested so many websites with those widgets... If facebook keeps living, I'll say "meeeh". If it goes down, I'll say "GREAT. Now's the chance for reddit and twitter and G+ and others".
  • kristopolous 13y ago
    Try ghostery. it's like adblock for share buttons. https://www.ghostery.com/ https://www.ghostery.com/
    • kzrdude 13y ago
      Ghostery-clean websites makes me so happy. Hacker News is one of them.
  • Loughla 13y ago
    And just what makes you think that the facebook replacement won't do exactly what they're doing, or, rather, aren't currently doing exactly what facebook is doing? Can you convince yourself that reddit isn't gamed by advertisers and companies in general? Can you convince yourself that twitter isn't as well? Can you convince yourself that G+ isn't gamed by one of the other eighteen people using it? Couldn't help myself.
    • jokoon 13y ago
      still prefer reddit though. facebook is really a bleak thing to use. I don't care about a replacement, maybe there won't be any, I just want to see it die. I just think other social networks are less evil than facebook, that's all. Being an asshole is not mandatory for a corporation.
  • thisiswrong 13y ago
    > If it goes down, I'll say "GREAT. Now's the chance for reddit and twitter and G+ and others". You cheer on centralized corporate systems that have business models based on censorship, vote manipulations, surveillance, arbitrary policy changes, and spam. While you cheer them on, I will be saying now's the chance for democratic distributed blockchain based replacements for the Twitters, Gmails, and Facebooks. Think Bitmessage, Namecoin, Ethereum, NXT, Bitcloud... http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1vd2r1/we_want_to_replace_youtube_dropbox_facebook/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1vd2r1/we_want_to_r...
• ry0ohki 13y ago
  I'm not entirely sure click farms are the cause. When I ran a recent "Like my Page" campaign as a test, I noticed 99% or something absurd came from Facebook mobile. I think it's just way easier for people to accidentally click the Like the page on mobile (no coincidence Facebook has reported record mobile revenue recently).
• joshfraser 13y ago
  The way to advertise on FB is to use a custom audience and pass in a list of every Facebook ID / email address you want to target. Yes, it's a lot more work, but it's also the best bang for the buck if you do the hard work to figure out who you really want to reach. I've driven a lot of revenue through Facebook ads, but it requires unconventional thinking. Just like Google, the obvious advertising options are usually a total waste of money.
  • jordan_litko 13y ago
    Wow, I didn't know you could even do that. This is a great solution and sounds super powerful. Thank you.
• eumenides1 13y ago
  In every Facebook HN post, there is always the "I deleted my FB account" and the "you can't really delete your FB data" back and forth. Instead of deleting your account has anybody tried to "trash" your account via "Liking" everything you can and posting a large sets of unrelated pics? your info is only really valuable because its "true". if you trashed your account, its pretty much the same as deleting. also based on the filtering mentioned in this article, it seems like at some point your friends would just filter you out. Thoughts?
  • flycaliguy 13y ago
    That is interesting. I'm wondering if you have thought of the best way to remove an account from Facebook, turning your account into a spammer. You could have a friend report it after a couple days of spamming. When, for example, an intelligence agency gathers people's information from a service like this they probably save themselves the hassle and do not include information from accounts marked spammer. Am I making sense?
    • UweSchmidt 13y ago
      Analyst to the new Intern: "Here is a list of stuff people have come up with to foil our algorithms. To familiarize yourself with our sophisticated tools, have a look at this problem: Find social media accounts that used to be real but are now flagged "spammer". Make categories such as "account was hacked", "sold" or "someone tries to go off the radar". For last category, we will set the scrutiny-level to 'elevated'."
• eumenides1 13y ago
  In every Facebook HN post, there is always the "I deleted my FB account" and the "you can't really delete your FB data" back and forth. Instead of deleting your account has anybody tried to "trash" your account via "Liking" everything you can and posting a large sets of unrelated pics? your info is only really valuable because its "true". if you trashed your account, its pretty much the same as deleting. also based on the filtering mentioned in this article, it seems like at some point your friends would just filter you out. Thoughts?
• hellbanTHIS 13y ago
  If it can be shown that Facebook is aware of this would it put them in legal jeopardy?
• at-fates-hands 13y ago
  It's interesting this is still making the rounds. Back in 2010 I remember seeing articles talking about how their ad services was a total Ponzi scheme. Nice to know not much has changed. At the time I was thinking about investing some pretty large amounts of money into advertising on FB. In hindsight, I'm really glad I didn't. http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme
• chaz 13y ago
  I thought I read a comment here that thought that there was a cultural difference as well. The author mentioned that a couple of distant friends in some countries who would Like every one of his posts, no matter what it was about. Regardless, the need to drive up page fans is probably over, as the value of a fan/Like was always questionable. Target your actual customer base and pay for clicks that matter. Facebook seems to still be a great place for performance-based display advertising.
• sytelus 13y ago
  Why everybody seem to ruling out the idea that FB is not running click farms? Theory that professional likers are clicking Virtual Cats and Virtual Bagles just so they don't get noticed by FB policing seems ridiculous.
  • loganu 13y ago
    I'm not sure. Maybe Facebook knows the blowback from advertisers would be severe and probably grounds for giant lawsuits / fraud cases. Could they outsource or fund clickfarms while still having plausible deniability? Probably. Could they cap people at 300 likes to give more real value to "likes?" Or punish accounts that are 1000% more active and clicky than regular users? Sure, but it hurts their short-term ad revenue. (And might even save the company.)
• dayaz36 13y ago
  I think this applies here... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8egWWkDnU8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8egWWkDnU8
• ye 13y ago
  Solution: limit the total number of likes per account to something like 50.
• newyorklenny 13y ago
  Exactly our experience as we tried to promote our page on Facebook. blog.pubchase.com/what-do-facebook-likes-of-companies-mean/
• natch 13y ago
  This is devastating.
• peasquared 13y ago
  Haha, I just posted my blog post about this sort of thing yesterday! Good timing. I'll update the post with this video. http://preeminentproductions.com/facebook-ads-part-2/ http://preeminentproductions.com/facebook-ads-part-2/
• droidist2 13y ago
  You know what else is interesting? If you pay per click then your ad gets shown to accounts that click on everything, but if you pay per impression (CPM) then your ad gets shown to people who almost never click on anything.
• icpmacdo 13y ago
  This dude has a good channel. This video blows my mind http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcrBqCFLHIY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcrBqCFLHIY
• raymondduke 13y ago
  I'm so glad this video came out. People like me can continue to dominate Facebook ads. This video will scare people away that do not know how Facebook ads work. Ask any internet marketer, Facebook ads are dominating unlike anything in history. A part of me thinks this video was made to drive people away from FB advertising on purpose.
• jay_kyburz 13y ago
  Facebook should stop trying to sell advertising and just start selling premium services directly to users. Seriously, just ask for $10 a month from everybody, then build some genuinely good new features.
  • jay_kyburz 13y ago
    Hrm.. just reading on the net Revenues: $2.59 billion, Monthly active users: 1.23 billion. Just need about $2 per MAU which is not crazy at all.
• raymondduke 13y ago
  I'm not a fan of this video. One is that it's told in a very convincing way. He sure spent some time on his charts and making his opinion sound factual. The problem is that he is wrong. Facebook ads are the most effective way to advertise, if you do them correctly. It's not Facebook that's fraudulent here. Facebook did what they said they'll do. It's the way this guy ran the ad that's the problem.
• raymondduke 13y ago
  I'm a fan of what works. And right now Facebook is what is working. I don't know if it's the same for you, but not a day goes by where I don't overhear someone talking about Facebook in public. About the video, the guy ran a poor campaign for a pointless page. He was expecting advertising to work like a magic button where you click it and you get engagement. The guy had no product and no target market. He advertised nothing to everyone. Of course he's going to get poor results. About the click farms. Yeah, they do exist. But it's not Facebook's fault. Just like it's not Google's fault if people use the internet to send spam. You have to think about the scale that Facebook operates. They're the number two website in the world. And the number one social network. Let that settle in for a second. Fraudulent activity is, unfortunately, inevitable when you have a site like that. The bottom line: become smarter with your ads. Have an actual product and a real audience. Ironically, I know of a copywriter / marketer that made a website for the dog niche. He gets 800,000 engagements a week on it. Every one of his posts gets 500-26,000 likes and tons of comments. The site is basically a news site for dogs. He just does content right. And he knows how to advertise. He doesn't spend time making fancy videos like this guy did. He gets things done. He gets results. He partners with dog related products and services and makes a killing entirely from a Facebook page. This video is an insult to marketers. It's like me trying to insert a floppy disk into a cdrom drive, then complaining that computer makers are all frauds.
  • sidcool 13y ago
    It seems you are missing the point of the video.
• sgaunt 13y ago
  I run a dating site as a side project. For me Google ads are too expensive and I couldn't target a particular country/age/sex as in facebook. (Yeah, likes are useless. But I just wanted eyeballs.) But in December they suddenly disapproved all the ads. The official reason is they want to review and remove inappropriate ads and the advertiser has to apply again on Feb 15. Then I read elsewhere on various forums that big dating advertisers are still allowed to advertise (I can see some ads) and this is a ploy to reduce the competition for big players during Valentine's Day season. Or else why Feb 15? Whatever you say about google, at least they strive to be fair and honest. I think being fair and honest is not in facebook's DNA. (Yeah, It is a throwaway account since I still want to advertise there :( )
• Kiro 13y ago
  I'm not so sure about the explanation. I have also gotten a lot of these useless "like thousand of random pages" likes but the difference is that I'm pretty sure they are real people. Could it be that their computer is hacked? That they are part of a like farm without knowing it? A lot of the profiles I've been analyzing seem to be really computer illiterate so it wouldn't surprise me if they are more prone to install viruses and less likely to understand that something is wrong when their feed is filled with updates from random pages.
• Kuroi 13y ago
  I think I understand the idea behind the video, but to me it looks like an experiment made by a very inexperienced advertiser. This guy could be a god walking between mere mortals on AdWords, but he surely lacks experience with Facebook advertising. Let me summarize why: - wrongly setted advertising: Google AdWords and Facebook Ads work in a completely different way. If you try to do advertising with Facebook the same way you do with AdWords... you are going to fail for sure. I work in a start-up that does Facebook Advertisng (AdEspresso [1] ) and I struggle to make customers understand the equation new instrument=new things to learn. The problem with fake clicks exists and has a lot of reasons, but is marginal and partially avoidable. It worsen if you do everything to avoid really interested people (fake page, wrong targets), I don't find it strange that you only get fake clicks (and really expensive ones!). - how to evaluate the effectiveness of an advertising campaign: the classic and easiest way to measure ROI is the LCA (Last Click Attribution) and is when you click on the ad → do the conversion, some browsing or less than 30 days in the middle are usually not a problem to keep the connection between those two actions. The classic example is AdWords when you are looking for a new razor. But what happens if I see a cool advertisement on Facebook about a cruise but it's not time yet for my holidays? I may like the page, visit it, and keep in mind that there is this really cool agency that sells fantastic cruises. It will come a time when I can ask for holidays at work, I'll remember the agency name and I'll google it looking for their website, also I may click on one of their ads because is between the top results. Next I buy the cruise: who gets the goal an who is the real dealer? That's why you look for Multi Touch Attribution models (MTA). Brand building and brand awareness are serious stuff. [1] http://adespresso.com http://adespresso.com
• popee 13y ago
  Gief bubble
• b6fan 13y ago
  Maybe Facebook could try something like Flattr: one user has, say, 30 likes per months for pages. If he or she likes 3000 pages in one month, then each like counts as only 0.01 normal like.
• hrjet 13y ago
  Although the conclusion of this video might be right (the engagement from users who like your page is not high), I don't agree with the premise that click farms are only present in developing nations. Moreover, an experiment with just ~10$ and ~35 likes seems statistically insignificant. A figure of at least 100$ and hundreds of likes would have been more credible.
• chris123 13y ago
  It's not Facebook that is the problem, it's the entire Silicon Valley culture. Facebook is just a reflection of that. Rotten to the core.
• santidarman 13y ago
  Of course I would to run a few tests to run my hypothesis, but an almost too easy feature could make this avoidable: the ability to remove from demographic people who like X. That way, if you want to target people who like Apple you can also avoid people who like HP or Dell. An easy enough solution, that Facebook should look into.
• hippich 13y ago
  project i wanted to start http://PaidSo.com http://PaidSo.com - basically a marketplace where you will get paid for posting stuff about local businesses. Seeing post from friends about restaurant opened in their area should give more significant bang for a buck then trying to sell something online to people reacting negatively to any online advertisement.
• _eqet 13y ago
  So what's gonna be next? auto generated user engagement and comments?
• mp99e99 13y ago
  Whats scary is from reading all this and my experience, if FB ever got their act together, it would be a serious hurt on GOOG.
• tieatie 13y ago
  great video. I experienced very similar things and have since cut back on promoting posts on Facebook. We have already cut our spending on Facebook by 50% over the last two months and I am thinking that pretty soon we will spend $0 on this soon to worthless social network.
• mannon 13y ago
  Yikes!
• CulturalNgineer 13y ago
  An (e.g.) 1/2 cent payment connected to the current Like button (whether it was credited to the likee or something else) would stop the Facebook Fraud problem by making them non-viable for clickfarms.. and still not seriously impact the original button's usability? for instance a user could designate a charity recipient for his likes Characteristics of the Monied "Like" Button http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2013/12/characteristics-of-monied-like-button.html http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2013/12/characteristics... One-Click Micropayment Capability for Volume Solicitations and Multiple Providers http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2013/12/one-click-micropayment-capability-for.html http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2013/12/one-click-micro...
• pcurve 13y ago
  I was expecting this would have more views by now.
• jitbit 13y ago
  The only type of Facebook marketing that kinda "works" - is "remarketing". I.e. when you show ads to people who have already visited your website.