
Facebook Fraud [video] - fanfantm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
======
notlisted
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.

~~~
xxbondsxx
Hey everyone -- sorry to hijack the top thread but I’m an ads engineer at
Facebook so I feel qualified to respond. I posted this over on reddit too but
it's still pending approval.

In the case of this ad — I think we actually delivered on what was asked for.
The targeting specs were fairly broad (cat lovers in four countries). Getting
39 people who like cats to like a page with a cute cat picture in 20 minutes
sounds pretty reasonable to me. If you want a specific kind of cat lover,
you’d probably want to target even more specifically (like people in a zip
code near you).

We're continually working on making it easier for advertisers to target the
right people. Earlier this year I worked on a piece of UI called "Audience
Definition" (in our ad create flow), which helps give advertisers guidance on
how to target ads more specifically. If you set your advertising too broadly
(or too narrowly) -- you get a warning.

Fake (and low quality) likes are bad for everyone. We don’t want advertisers
to get fans that aren’t good for their business -- we want to help them drive
real results, and we can’t do that with bad likes. We invest a lot in
improving the systems to monitor and remove fake likes from the system, and
also in helping advertisers set smart targeting to help them reach the people
they care most about.

And to be honest, a lot of people like cats, and the picture on the page is
pretty adorable. Lots of real people like lots of things. And LOTS of people
like cats. :P -Peter

~~~
JacobJans
I spent $46k on Facebook ads last year, with very healthy ROI.

First, I want to say THANK YOU for the many improvements to the ad system that
have recently taken place.

Second, I want to say that you have a LOT of work left to do. Facebook
marketing is hard. Too hard.

I have many suggestions, but here's one of them:

Allow the same targeting options when posting directly to the page, as when
posting an ad.

For example, I can create a custom audience, and send an ad only to them.

I want to be able to target (or exclude) that custom audience when I post to
my Facebook page. If I could do that it would make a huge difference.

Thank you for your time / consideration.

~~~
seestheday
I do analytics for a major brand you have definitely heard of.

We spend way more than $46K/year.

I agree with Jacob here. If you are willing to work at it, facebook can give
you a very healthy ROI. It is not nearly as easy as with Google though.

\- Buying likes is basically a waste of time unless your goal is to stroke
someones ego or are trying to generate some sort of "social proof"

\- Re-targetting via Custom Audiences is awesome (you need a robust CRM
program to take advantage of this, or at least an email list).

\- Lookalike audiences are promising, but you have to work at them.

Edit: paragraphs

~~~
mpeg
I work in the field and have seen companies who spend several million a month,
agree with your key points.

For companies of that size, data is everything, if an ad is underperforming it
stops running, if an ad is bringing you low quality clicks (for example, like
farms) it will stop running too.

It's really silly to look at someone saying they dumped $20k in FB ads and it
didn't pan out without providing any kind of data at all, how many
creatives/targeting permutations did they try? did they monitor their ads at
all? did they try to negatively target those bad likes they were getting?

I've even seen "custom" lookalike audience implementations, to squeeze that
extra cost/performance ratio out of it.

------
lingben
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.

~~~
cinquemb
What I don't understand is why doesn't facebook try to leverage it's data and
serve contextual/interest ads on other sites in similar way that google does
with adsense? I know I would use it with my startup.

That way, they don't have to conflate the incentives of the different parties
involved as much as they are doing now.

~~~
brandnewlow
Those ads typically perform pretty terribly

~~~
quacker
Something doesn't make sense here... I gathered from other threads that
Google's ads are preferred over facebook's. So either Google doesn't do
"contextual/interest based" ads, or contextual/interest based ads do not
perform terribly (compared to what facebook is currently doing).

~~~
brandnewlow
Google's search ads perform very well. They capture people in the moment of
intent. Google's 3rd party ads perform badly since they are abstracted much
further away from live intent, but Google gets away with it because they are
pay per click, which implies lower risk for advertisers.

~~~
cinquemb
I don't disagree, but with that logic, maybe facebook could get away with it
too. And I didn't suggest it as an either/or thing, just maybe something to
reduce the pressure on the current revenue streams. For certain types of
sites/products, facebook could give google a run for their money with a
competing product.

------
thinkcomp
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.

~~~
memracom
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.

------
mullingitover
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.

~~~
tonydiv
I have completely hidden my news feed. Since I consider FB only to be valuable
as a utility, i.e. a means of communication or a repository of information
such as where someone lives, the newsfeed is a complete waste of time and
useless.

My solution is to use custom CSS to hide the newsfeed, but keep everything
else. As a result, I spent 1/10th the time on Facebook, and only use it when I
need to get information from it.

[https://medium.com/productivity-
efficiency/631ed8f466e1](https://medium.com/productivity-
efficiency/631ed8f466e1)

~~~
kostko
I did something similar on Youtube, I've hidden all the side videos to help me
focus on the video I was watching. But on FB, I unfollowed 99% of the people,
and only left things like 'March Against Monsanto', and 'Naturalnews', so so
my feed only contains stuff that matters to me.

~~~
tonydiv
How long did it take you to unfollow everyone on FB? Sounds like that would
take a while for someone with 1800 friends.

~~~
kostko
~150 friends only, I unfollowed only when a post appeared. And I marked lots
of people as acquaintances. Why do you have 1800 friends? Dang.

------
kzrdude
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".

~~~
capkutay
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
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.

~~~
commandar
Facebook determines post visibility based on engagement. If a high percentage
of your likes are fraudulent and don't engage, that means that the initial
group your post is shown to is less likely to engage, and, in turn, your post
is less likely to be seen by legitimate followers since the low engagement
means Facebook won't expand the percentage of your followers that see it in
the first place.

~~~
droopyEyelids
What is to stop click farms from evolving into selling engagement as well as
likes?

~~~
commandar
I'm not sure, beyond effort required. It would at least be _slightly_ less
actively harmful to advertisers, though.

------
mschaecher
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
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.

~~~
yaur
There is already a bunch of startups around this problem. A friend of mine
works at Adaptly which, among many others, let buyers who don't know social
media advertising essentially outsource the expertise required to do so
effectively. It's always seemed a bit like snake oil to me, but maybe its a
real problem.

~~~
mschaecher
You're right it's a real problem.

There are literally hundreds of "startups" doing that for social media
advertising. Hundreds for search. Hundreds for display, and not just regular
display, but RTB(sarcasm)! There are tons of startups doing it for native ads.
And don't forget video, seo & content marketing among others.

Add on to that, the partner/provider lists of "startups" that sit on top of
one or many of those tools.

And let's not forget about the 1000s of agencies out there to roll it all up.

There are tons of snake oil salesman, and many good tools and people in that
list. But as with pretty much any ecosystem, it's 80% crap, 10% meh, 10% bam.

And there is no one right answer. Just like no absolute answer to Python vs
Ruby.

So whenever I see articles like, "facebook ads bad! look what they're doing!"

Change it to, "facebook ads bad! Look at all the things I'm doing wrong, but
don't even know enough to know I'm doing wrong!"

------
TeMPOraL
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.

~~~
junto
I'm an anti-ads person, even though I know it hurts some of the sites I like
who depend on advertising.

I'm anti-ads because the kind of ads that I am being exposed to are invasive,
especially re-targeting ads. I.e. those ads where you've been on a website and
thought about buying something, then decided against it? Then you get the same
product advertised to you on random other sites you visit.

I cannot stand it when those ads follow me around. In fact, assuming I didn't
buy the product or service for a good reason, and I do want to buy the
product, I will deliberately buy from a competitor, because fuck you and your
invasion of my privacy. It is my own little way of silent protest.

I assume I'm in a minority though and most people don't care. Most of the time
I use an ad-blocker. iPad doesn't have a solution unfortunately.

~~~
nForce
Yes, you are in the tiny minority :) So your actions are pretty
inconsequential to most companies

------
kpao
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
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
Why should I click some random URL shortened link no matter how enticing you
think the lead in is?

~~~
dclara
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-
busine...](http://bingobo.info/blog/bingobo/how-bingobo-can-help-business-
solve-their-seo-problems.jsp)

------
eumenides1
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
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
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'."

------
quadrangle
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.

~~~
leobelle
Well, ad based revenue is not broken for Facebook or Google. They employ
thousands of engineers and have made billions in revenue.

~~~
quadrangle
It _should_ be broken. People just don't know to use Adblock. And it is broken
from the perspective of being a reasonable thing to do. Both of those examples
rely on totally crazy privacy invasion.

------
acangiano
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
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.

------
at-fates-hands
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)

------
downandout
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.

------
nonsequ
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
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
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.

------
nayefc
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
We need better solution.

~~~
joeblau
Pay for quality products.

~~~
nayefc
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
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
Putting ads on the users timeline pages may not decrease fraud. The fraud
issue is not where you put the ad at.

------
ChuckMcM
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+.

~~~
mbesto
It reminds me of the poorly aligned incentives of Yelp (and to be fair, all
accreditation institutions)

------
lmg643
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
WP wrote about this story, and there was an inadequate response from facebook
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2014/02/10...](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/)

------
sgaunt
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 :( )

------
joshfraser
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
Wow, I didn't know you could even do that. This is a great solution and sounds
super powerful. Thank you.

------
sytelus
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
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.)

------
j_s
Can Facebook ads be targeted at users with less than a certain number of
likes?

~~~
pcurve
That will encourage click farms to just create more bogus accounts.

~~~
bambax
You could target ads to accounts that have less than x likes AND are more than
y years old.

~~~
pcurve
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.

------
droidist2
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.

------
taylorlb
There should be an option for page owners to clean their likes based on
engagement if they want to.

------
drawkbox
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
"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)

------
knownhuman
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.

------
smaddali
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
Why would anyone even hire the fraudsters? (Once they understand they're
buying 'Likes' which reduce their reach due to lower engagement)

------
tharri
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
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.

------
newyorklenny
Exactly our experience as we tried to promote our page on Facebook.
blog.pubchase.com/what-do-facebook-likes-of-companies-mean/

------
doubt_me
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

~~~
pjc50
You can easily enough come up with a million "real" names for your fake
profiles. Meanwhile G+ penalises people with genuine but surprising names.

------
Kuroi
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)

------
CulturalNgineer
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...](http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2013/12/characteristics-
of-monied-like-button.html)

One-Click Micropayment Capability for Volume Solicitations and Multiple
Providers [http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2013/12/one-click-
micro...](http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2013/12/one-click-micropayment-
capability-for.html)

------
peasquared
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/)

------
wzy
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

------
jokoon
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".

~~~
Loughla
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
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.

------
Kiro
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.

------
b6fan
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.

------
icpmacdo
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)

------
tlogan
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.

------
chaz
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.

------
chris123
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.

------
hrjet
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.

------
santidarman
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.

------
raymondduke
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
It seems you are missing the point of the video.

------
raymondduke
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.

------
protomyth
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
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
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.

------
jay_kyburz
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
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.

------
phaer
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

------
jitbit
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.

------
fuzzywalrus
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.

------
linux_devil
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 .

------
dayaz36
I think this applies here...
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8egWWkDnU8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8egWWkDnU8)

------
hippich
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.

------
mp99e99
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.

------
raymondduke
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.

------
ry0ohki
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).

------
hellbanTHIS
If it can be shown that Facebook is aware of this would it put them in legal
jeopardy?

------
rsanaie
So what's gonna be next? auto generated user engagement and comments?

------
natch
This is devastating.

------
pcurve
I was expecting this would have more views by now.

------
leoplct
FB stock is losing -1.21%

------
ishener
i wonder if promoting posts also lead to fake/false exposure

------
popee
Gief bubble

------
mannon
Yikes!

------
blumkvist
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
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
>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
Well said. I think your adwords example is spot on.

------
ye
Solution: limit the total number of likes per account to something like 50.

------
tieatie
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.

------
gfodor
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.

------
debt
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_
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.

~~~
raymondduke
He used the endorsement poorly. He does a way better job at putting on a show
than providing a convincing argument.

------
JacobJans
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?

~~~
Finster
If the people didn't like his content, then why did they "like" it?

~~~
mikeg8
winner winner chicken dinner

