
How Eduardo Saverin sold Facebook ads in 2004 (2012) - ankitkumar98
https://digiday.com/media/how-eduardo-saverin-sold-facebook-ads-in-2004/
======
gabaix
Slide 5 “The College Addiction” talks about the addictive nature of Facebook.

Using the word addiction must have been a sound sales pitch in the early days.
An expression that has quickly been replaced by technical terms like
‘engagement’ and ‘retention’.

~~~
smichel17
> Slide 5 “The College Addiction” talks about the addictive nature of
> Facebook.

> Using the word addiction must have been a sound sales pitch in the early
> days. An expression that has quickly been replaced by technical terms like
> ‘engagement’ and ‘retention’.

> Using the word addiction must have been a sound sales pitch in the early
> days.

Yes, it used to be a positive thing, eg, "So good/fun you'll get addicted". I
haven't thought about addictinggames.com for maybe a decade but it seems like
they're still around.

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dang
Discussed at the time (of the article):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4408304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4408304)

~~~
newswasboring
The top comment there[1] describe use of ad in such a wholesome way that I
almost cried. Don't even know why it effected me so much. Is this what
facebook ads should have been? People advertising to each other rather than
companies advertising to people? Another question which poped in my head is
would this lead to more or less data gathering? To target in such a hyper
localized way can either be done with a lot of info or in a less intrusive way
by just looking at the buyer's social graph.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4408747](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4408747)

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saagarjha
> The knock on Facebook is often that it doesn’t have its ad strategy figured
> out.

Did a double take until I saw the date. This aged spectacularly poorly…

~~~
newswasboring
How did that age poorly? They didn't say they can't figure it out, they said
they haven't. And from what I read, they had not at the time.

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GuiA
[2012] needed in title. That slide deck is certainly a historical artefact
worth preserving.

And yeah, Facebook does roll off the tongue better than Thefacebook.com.

~~~
ankitkumar98
edited. And definitely agree on the second point.

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triangleman
I'm assuming that all of those targeting factors match up to the user-provided
info in their profile. So for instance "house/dormitory" was probably a
profile field back in 2004.

Kind of reminds me of how Google started selling ads, just buy a keyword,
that's it. And the CPM was determined by bidding (though I'm not sure how you
make that fair)

~~~
isiahl
Well, in the same slide deck it talks about how it recorded the users last
access location and "the site has a built-in database of school dormitories
and halls". Is it possible that the site was able to automatically determine
what hall/dorm you were in depending on your network connection?

~~~
triangleman
Actually yes, now that I looked at dang's link to the same post discussed
previously on HN, that's exactly what they were doing: determining dorm/hall
based on IP address and other stuff.

So my comment was dead wrong. I'm sorry for assuming that facebook ever
regarded its users as anything other than "dumb fucks" that they could track
as they please.

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noelrock
I realise I’m probably not in a majority here on this one but: I’m not
offended or too bothered by being targeted by ads on Facebook.

What I am offended by however is how poor the targeted ads are on Facebook. I
don’t think I’ve ever bought anything based on one or even been tempted to.

~~~
rawoke083600
This ! Looking in from the other side..Im usually appalled at how bad their
advertising is from an advertisers point of view. I tried to target ppl for
'broadband options', Thus one might expect the lead to have a house(not own
just a roof over his head) , He might liked netflix and streaming and certain
modern games. The amount of basically 'homeless ppl' liking the ad is amazing
! Like the bulk genuinely just look like fake profiles !

Not

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noncoml
They should be forced to display this in their sign up page.

And with bold letters:

"Be warned: We are trying to sell target ads based on your sensitive personal
information such as, but not limited to:

Sex Sexual Orientation Relationship status Income Education level "

~~~
jaywalk
Maybe I'm weird, but I don't mind ads being targeted to me based on any info
that I choose to make publicly available. If I have to see ads, at least give
me relevant ones.

I know Facebook goes well beyond that into some pretty creepy territory, but
that's not what I'm talking about.

~~~
eberkund
Most of the info is not publicly available but collected by inferring
information about based on the pages you visit, who you talk and which other
users you associate with.

~~~
heromal
That's... Public info.

~~~
Fezzik
I think that is in reference to Facebook mining your DMs and web searches,
neither of which are viewable to your FB friends or other internet users at
large. FB accesses any and everything they can regarding your browsing
behavior and ends up with far more data about a user than what is displayed
publicly on the user’s public profile.

