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"Believe me, I tried to do honest optimization—running legitimate flower ads on Valentines Day, Walmart ads on Cyber Monday, auto insurance offers on car racing

"Believe me, I tried to do honest optimization—running legitimate flower ads on Valentines Day, Walmart ads on Cyber Monday, auto insurance offers on car racing games, and so forth. For months, I went through over 150 offers across a dozen networks, systematically testing offers, ad copy, targeting, creative templates, and so forth. I couldn’t get a single one to work. And in a previous life I worked on Yahoo!’s internal analytics team—our job was to optimize traffic. I finally came to this realization: People on Facebook won’t pay for anything. They don’t have credit cards, they don’t want credit cards, and they are not interested in shopping." I found this out the hard way too. Trying to do legitimate business on a social network is like trying to sell life insurance at a night club. People just aren't in the right frame of mind when they are there to respond to it. This is why Facebook's self-serve ad platform will never amount to anything. It will only be able to sell to platform games, dating sites, and maybe some t-shirts.

jbenz 17y ago
I've tried to sell t-shirts via Facebook ads, without much luck. Actually, a couple years ago when Facebook Ads were called Facebook Fliers, and there was very little competition, we sold a ton of t-shirts. This "insider's confession" is extremely contradictory. He starts about by saying "People on Facebook won’t pay for anything". And then he closes by saying that once the legit advertisers start to grow on Facebook, it will push the scammers out. How are legit advertisers going to be able to do that if no one on Facebook buys anything, regardless of the targeting? And then he claims the legit guys will be able to afford $10-50 CPMs. I can't imagine that will actually happen. Maybe it will, but as of now, people are on Facebook to talk and share with their friends. If a business wants to be successful on Facebook, then it needs to be successful in the old school real world way: word-of-mouth. Make an awesome product, get people talking about it, and you'll see lots of Facebook traffic and conversions.

jbenz 17y ago

I've tried to sell t-shirts via Facebook ads, without much luck. Actually, a couple years ago when Facebook Ads were called Facebook Fliers, and there was very little competition, we sold a ton of t-shirts. This "insider's confession" is extremely contradictory. He starts about by saying "People on Facebook won’t pay for anything". And then he closes by saying that once the legit advertisers start to grow on Facebook, it will push the scammers out. How are legit advertisers going to be able to do that if no one on Facebook buys anything, regardless of the targeting? And then he claims the legit guys will be able to afford $10-50 CPMs. I can't imagine that will actually happen. Maybe it will, but as of now, people are on Facebook to talk and share with their friends. If a business wants to be successful on Facebook, then it needs to be successful in the old school real world way: word-of-mouth. Make an awesome product, get people talking about it, and you'll see lots of Facebook traffic and conversions.