
Facebook lured advertisers by inflating video ad-watch times: lawsuit - Jerry2
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/10/16/facebook-lured-advertisers-by-inflating-ad-watch-times-up-to-900-percent-lawsuit/
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gk1
Pretty sure Twitter has an ad metrics problem too. As I wrote last year:

> When I ran a Twitter Ads campaign for one of my clients, within two days I
> noticed that Google Analytics was reporting nearly 100% fewer visitors from
> the campaign than Twitter was reporting clicks. That is, if Twitter counted
> (and charged for) 100 clicks, Google Analytics showed fewer than 5 visitors
> from the campaign.

> The support team at Twitter Ads told me they are legitimate clicks, but
> people are probably clicking the image in the tweet to expand the tweet or
> image, not expecting it to take them to a different site. As soon as they
> realize they’ve just clicked an outgoing link, they go back or close the tab
> before our site and Google Analytics script even has time to load.

[https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-ad-campaigns-
fail/](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-ad-campaigns-fail/)

~~~
emilsedgh
A billion dollar business relying such a shallow dark-ui technique for it's
main source of revenue.

The state of marketing departments in companies must be a joke if this is how
Facebook and Twitter are milking them.

I imagine billions of dollars are being wasted in companies with no return
value in the name of "marketing".

And if anyone ever thinks Facebook and Twitter are actual competition to
Google in ad market they must be out of their minds.

~~~
cm2012
I am a direct response marketer, and only manage ad campaigns that provably
generate revenue. Over $10,000,000 spend across more than a dozen companies. I
can tell you that for many products Facebook absolutely outperforms Google.

~~~
cstejerean
I’m not surprised. Google shows me ads for things I’m searching for, but
Facebook shows me ads for things I wouldn’t even know to look for. I can
definitely see how one or the other would be better depending on the type of
product.

~~~
Bartweiss
On the whole, Google shows me two types of ads: things I don't want, and
things that are competing with non-ad links to the same product.

I can understand why Google gets bidding wars over people searching for
"vacuum cleaner" or "cheap web hosting", but for most other things I can't
quite imagine the use case. I either don't want to buy something, or I know
who I'm buying from.

Facebook seems much better placed to show things like "hey, you liked this
band and you live in this town, did you know they're coming next month?" On
very rare occasions, FB actually manages to achieve the theoretical role of
ads as "notifying people about mutually beneficial transactions". And when
they don't, I can at least see that the ads are having effects like "making me
aware of a consulting firm" that a marketer might value. Meanwhile, I've never
seen a Google search ad I valued, and I don't know if I've ever seen an Ad
Words ad I valued.

(Actually, I've benefited from Youtube ads occasionally also. But only ever
for learning about new-release music, movies, or games.)

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jsemrau
I have mentioned that several times before, but I always believed that FB's
but also Google's metrics are at least borderline fraudulent. Inflated by bots
and apps that simulate DAUs and clicks.

I only have anecdotal evidence from Google, where I was frequently charged
over my campaign limit on ad clicks that I could never validate on my own
site. I believe FB is same.

~~~
village-idiot
I personally suspect that’s why Twitter has failed to deal with their bot
problem, fixing it would make their usage metrics plumit.

~~~
m_ke
Also the reason why reddit went through the redesign. It lets them hide ads in
the infinite scroll and pretend that people looked at them.

~~~
village-idiot
I really can’t help but wonder if our entire online ecosystem is built
entirely on fraudulent ad sales.

~~~
dragonsky67
Shhh, don't say that out loud.

I love the fact that I get internet content for nothing as it's paid for by
big advertisers who are to stupid to realise that I never purchase anything
that they advertise.

~~~
village-idiot
Thankfully nobody important cares about my opinion.

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throwaway_trust
I work in ad-tech and let me tell you all these wall gardens are so arrogant
that they create their own metrics for measurement and bully industry
(especially marketers to follow them).

I strongly believe only way to bring these mega companies to senses and rein
in on their arrogance by trust busting and creating level playing field for
competition.

We need DOJ and anti-trust into big 3 oligopoly (GOOG, FB, AMZN) to crack down
on them. They are too big for small players to compete.

~~~
adtac
I'm just wondering, at how many companies does a oligopoly become a healthy,
competitive environment?

~~~
lmm
I once saw an economics paper that used a simple model and showed that when
the top 4 companies in a given industry controlled more than 60% of the market
they would naturally behave like a cartel even if they weren't coordinating.
So that's probably the tipping point.

~~~
maxwell
Interesting, I'd love to see the source if you can find it.

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keyle
On a side note, if you use instagram, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but
literally every 3-4 pictures is an ad now. It's so annoying, they're
completely ruining the experience and it affects my retention rate and my will
to come back.

~~~
imagetic
They're just reinforcing the demise of the platform. Over 80% of the last
followers I picked up were bots. At least I'm assuming anyone who followers
4800 people can't be human.

~~~
r3bl
You can follow 100k people, it won't matter. You'll still see updates from
about 20-30 people or so.

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cm2012
This is why, if you advertise, measure results on purchases or leads generated
and nothing else. Every ad platform's engagement measures are useless to you
unless you have a lot of experience and context for what they mean.

~~~
nostromo
That's incredibly difficult for large brands to do.

If Target's sales are up this holiday, was it the TV ads, the print ads, or
the online ads? Or maybe it wasn't any of them and the economy is just up.

~~~
cm2012
Target has teams with context and experience in how to properly use, measure
and attribute those numbers. 99% of start-ups, even very well funded ones,
don't.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
What do youbmean by that? When I buy something at Target stores, they have
absolutely no way to attribute whether I saw something on TV, a billboard, the
aisle, their junk mail in my mailbox, or online.

~~~
mattlondon
I believe that Google can link in-store purchases to online ad exposure for
most credit card users in the US. They've done this by doing a deal with
MasterCard to integrate sales data cookie data.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-
an...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-and-
mastercard-cut-a-secret-ad-deal-to-track-retail-sales)

~~~
lawnchair_larry
I’m aware, but that still doesn’t apply to what I said.

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meritt
In 2008 I worked for an ad network and we dealt with a massive amount of
fraudulent traffic. We did our best to shield our advertisers from the
obviously bogus traffic, as it absolutely killed traffic quality and inflated
CPAs.

However some advertisers, notably one large video game/entertainment website,
wanted to purchase as much traffic as possible, and they were overjoyed to get
the bot traffic (which went for a CPC of about $0.001). They were buying
$10-20k per day from us of fraudulent traffic. Turns out they were relying on
the audience engagement platforms (alexa, hitwise, quantcast, comscore, etc)
to track their audience size and those platforms incorrectly counted our bot
traffic as legitimate.

As the majority of their advertisers were brand marketing (e.g. Nintendo
paying for a full-site background spread for the latest Zelda) and there was
no direct way to measure success, advertisers would be swayed by the third-
party audience profiles and agree it was good idea to spend massive amounts of
money on ad campaigns there.

~~~
IAmGraydon
How and why was bot traffic priced at $0.001 CPC? No ad network would price
legitimate traffic that low, which means you must have known it was
illegitimate. So that means you were complicit in committing fraud against the
downstream advertisers, correct?

~~~
meritt
> How and why was bot traffic priced at $0.001 CPC?

Our ad server code only supported 3 decimal places. It wasn't until later that
we figured out the how/why behind their desire for what we outright informed
them was most likely bot traffic. And yeah, I didn't stay much longer at that
company. The entire industry is incredibly sketchy and that apparently hasn't
changed much.

------
hammock
Facebook could still be doing it... There is no third party auditor of their
ad analytics. And you can't create one either, because you can't scrape a
walled garden like Facebook the way you can scrape the internet.

The only thing that's true is the data you are measuring yourself, which would
be web traffic, conversions etc. Although it's not inconceivable that a
fraudulent actor would send bit traffic with (e.g. Facebook) referrer tags to
your site to make you think you were getting greater reach with your ads than
you were.

~~~
andreygrehov
I wonder if you can reproduce the inflation by ultra-targeting a number of
hand picked users.

~~~
hammock
You can create "custom audiences" by uploading a list of email addresses, it
has to be a minimum size group of 100 I believe.

However it's unlikely that you'd see too much as I have to imagine most of the
inflation is happening in the broader targeting efforts. "males 18-31 with
these interests" etc.

------
givinguflac
Gotta hand it to Facebook, at least they’re consistent with one thing: being
deceptive.

------
keiferski
I genuinely don't understand why anyone, anywhere, would trust Facebook with
anything. They've been nothing but unethical and misleading from the start.
I'm not saying this to be hyperbolic - it simply seems like a poor business
decision to get involved with them.

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imagetic
I've been doing a large amount of video production that is published to
Facebook for the last few years. Mostly live, some post / uploaded work. But
the live productions stats the morning after an event are extremely suspect.
It seems like the numbers astronomically inflated.

~~~
IAmGraydon
So who do you suspect is the bad actor and what is their motivation?

~~~
darpa_escapee
Facebook. More money.

~~~
IAmGraydon
I don’t follow. How would FB profit from showing you an inflated number of
plays? Are you paying them for plays?

~~~
acct1771
Inflated efficacy of Facebook as a platform.

~~~
imagetic
Many of the numbers I've seen are more in line with impressions. The app
loading and being somewhere in a timeline dramatically inflates their numbers.
In reality, I know a lot of people who see little to no gain from Facebook as
a platform at this point. Especially for small business.

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iamleppert
Seems to be a pretty big nail in the coffin for them and this is just the tip
of the iceberg. lol. A class action of one of their core revenue streams is
going to be very expensive. I think we should just make Facebook a public
utility, and do them like the utility companies were done; congress can easily
decide to transfer control of the company and all of its assets in a single
resolution. Then, drastically reduce headcount by getting rid of all the
business teams, sales, marketing and keeping only essential technical and
administrative staff. Sell off the other unrelated business units (Oculus
etc). Allow the company to operate and make a minuscule profit margin while
allowing the local governments decision making ability regarding the content
and policing of the networks under their geography.

~~~
swift532
I'd like this more than the status quo, but this still leaves the door open
for governments to read private messages and leverage social platforms for
manipulation. In my mind, and I admit I am not certain this is possible - the
only right way for a social network to function is for it to be decentralized
and user data controlled by individual users - with optins for any "sharing".

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stevehawk
Didn't this come about because Facebook autoplays videos and any video played
more than 3 seconds counts as a viewing?

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Bombthecat
Not only Video ads. I'm pretty sure all other ads too.

Something is really off with the numbers on Facebook (in my opinion on Google
too, but there I'm not so sure)

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zwhatever
Zuckerberg stealing something isn't news, it's his only business model.

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locklock
is there any chance facebook will improve in the future, in any way? both the
increasingly terrible user experience and the company's shady practices seem
like features rather than bugs at this point and to fix either would require a
fundamental shift that i can't imagine happening.

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gammateam
all adtech companies do this by the way.

~~~
ionised
That's not a good excuse.

~~~
gammateam
It wasn't an excuse, it was a public service announcement.

Hauling Facebook's CEO into legislative inquiries worldwide totally misses the
Mark. Masquerading Facebook as the Face of this reality is totally
disingenuous and more of a reflection of discomfort and fatigue people already
had with that service than a genuine expression against the data brokers.

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adamnemecek
Is this company legit imploding?

~~~
keyle
At this point they might be "too big to fail".

~~~
ionised
There is absolutely nothing about Facebook that is essential or irreplaceable.

~~~
kjprince
They have just a bit of traction...that's pretty hard to replace

~~~
ionised
Traction in what context?

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re1man
Haha

