

Facebook is selling invisible ad impressions - youssefsarhan
http://blog.sefsar.com/post/28370197014/facebook-is-selling-invisible-ad-impressions

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chewxy
In Display advertising this is common. The fact that tools like Adxpose exist
points that this is a common problem for advertisers. Very often the
impressions are sold anyway.

Heck, C3Metrics has even come out with a new product - Viewable Impressions
solely to address this issue.

Is this a problem? Yes and no. I think ad spaces should always be sold. But I
think there should be a price difference between impression loaded and
impression viewed.

~~~
seannicholls
I'd like to know under what circumstances you think that a company or
individual should, or would, pay for advertising which is not (by definition)
used?

even if it were at a different price, why would _anyone_ pay for advertising,
knowing full well that it would not be viewed?

~~~
chewxy
Simple. Pages with long content under the fold. Most of the ad tags are called
with page load, and there will be many situations where the ads will be served
but not seen. The situation cannot be helped.

In case you're wondering about asynchronous ad-loading, i.e only load an ad
when the tag scrolls into the viewport, no that is not a viable option because
the world out there is crazily varied, and not everyone uses the latest
nightly build of Chromium. There are a lot of bad javascript engines out
there, so I wouldn't jump to assume that async loading of ads would work
across the board. Trust me I've worked on this problem before.

As for why different pricing would work: what I had meant was billing post-
facto.

So for example, you may have an IO saying you're buying 300k imps per day at
$1 CPM viewed and $0.1 unviewed. At the end of the day you may have 150k
viewed and 150k unviewed. You only pay $165 instead of $300

EDIT: I have bad arithmetics for an asian person

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taligent
This really takes the cake for one of the dumbest posts I've seen for a while.

What exactly are you expecting Facebook to do: hide content and just show ads
? And how is this anyway different from Google's Search page or almost every
website with advertising for that matter.

~~~
youssefsarhan
Hide content and just show ads? What? Who ever suggested anything like that?
If other sites are doing this, then they're messing up too. So I've no idea
what are you talking about.

They are loading ad impressions that aren't visible. That's a major problem,
because it's preventable. Why don't they track scroll –which I'm sure they do
already– and load ads accordingly. Their only defense would be that they load
the ads, but don't charge for them unless the user scrolls.

