

Here Comes Facebook’s Ad Network: Mobile Ads Launching This Month - uptown
http://recode.net/2014/04/20/here-comes-facebooks-ad-network-mobile-ads-launching-this-month/

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syntheticlife
If there was any doubt as to why mobile browsers are so uncustomizable, it is
specifically because it is the last remaining place where users are held
captive by content providers.

This is why Google and Apple don't allow plugins. This is why mobile is
important. It's the last place users can be held down and forced to view
advertisements against their wishes. Why do you think Firefox Home (mobile)
was killed off? There's no money in it.

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sheetjs
> This is why Google and Apple don't allow plugins. This is why mobile is
> important. It's the last place users can be held down and forced to view
> advertisements against their wishes.

It's clear why Google is incentivized to force users to view advertisements,
but why Apple? AFAICT they don't profit from banner ads on others' sites (IIRC
there are no iAds for Safari)

~~~
Zhenya
Chrome fan here who finally switched to firefox mobile because of this
specific issue.

Ad block plus + ghostery.

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rebel
My guess is that the recent 'nearby friends' feature from FB was no
coincedence. Once I'm already being alerted that my friends are at the bar I
just drove by, why not an alert that the ice cream shop I just passed is
having a 25% off sale? Facebook and Google are probably the only companies
with enough small business advertisers to pull this off, and I don't think
Google has enough active mobile activity to pu this off (especially without
WhatsApp). And of course it would be far too risky to build that into Android
and push everyone to iOS. I think it's pretty clear Adwords is useless for
your local ice cream shop, but an always active mobile alert for nearby
customers could provide huge results. I've been expecting this for years but
without a massive userbase and a significant number of advertisers it just
wouldn't work. I think we're reaching the point where it is viable now though.

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rondon2
I already have Google maps on my phone. If I want to find an ice cream shop
nearby, I will look up ice cream on Google maps. If there are two equally
close I may be inclined to go to the one that has an add saying 25% off, but
that is basically Groupon with a search nearby feature.

One feature that could be useful is "Siri/Google what restaurants have less
than a 15 minute wait near me?" or "Google what bars nearby have Sam Adams on
tap?" I'm not sure how much a bar would pay facebook/google for this feature
though?

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vecio
So finally Facebook enters the dominant market of Google. I bet the social
giant can do ads better, but vice verse?

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higherpurpose
I thought they already tried that - and failed. People predicted for years
that Facebook will build an ad network that will threaten Google's ad
business, because it's "social". However, Facebook's ad network turned out to
be a little more than a glorified traditional ad network: just showing ads to
eyeballs, and only segmenting by a certain demographic and on some
"interests". But that's still nowhere near the efficiency of _intent_ -based
ad networks, where people actually look for the stuff they might be interested
in buying, as opposed to ads being pushed to them still mostly randomly.

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prostoalex
There's actually not that much money in building an AdSense competitor, as
AdSense-related revenues are plunging [http://www.zdnet.com/googles-earnings-
what-future-for-plungi...](http://www.zdnet.com/googles-earnings-what-future-
for-plunging-adsense-business-7000025764/) with webmasters building made-for-
adsense sites tailored for click-throughs, advertisers opting out of perceived
lower-quality traffic, and quality publishers having access to higher premiums
with other networks (including Google's own).

AdBrite comes to mind as the most well-known third party competitor, and they
shut down last year.

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iaskwhy
A $12B plunging market still has some value to it.

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lingben
yay! new ways to shred your ad budget on facebook's fraudulent clicks and spam
click farms

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g)

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notastartup
In my opinion, on the mobile phone, I almost always accidentally click the ad
while trying to close it, never because I was interested in the ad itself like
I would be when I search for something on google and see an text ad beside the
search results.

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jonathanjaeger
Very true, it is a problem, but I still experience better ROI for most ad
campaigns via mobile advertising (even if you throw in the misclicks it still
comes in cheaper at scale).

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hayksaakian
Even with Facebook ads? I've had 10x to the CTR on mobile vs desktop news feed
ads with 10x less conversion rate

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jonathanjaeger
Yes I've experienced great ROI on mobile newsfeed, but also desktop newsfeed
too. I think both of those are better in term s of ROI than their current
right-hand rail ads (the ones on the side of the page they used to exclusively
have).

I found if your CTR is TOO high to the point you get tons of misclicks and bad
conversion, make your image size much smaller (max 150 pixels).

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hrish2006
People are still using Facebook?

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msoad
Yeah, billions of them apparently.

