
How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insiders Confession - code_devil
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a-pro-an-insiders-confession/
======
mattmaroon
"Believe me, I tried to do honest optimization—running legitimate flower ads
on Valentines Day, Walmart ads on Cyber Monday, auto insurance offers on car
racing games, and so forth. For months, I went through over 150 offers across
a dozen networks, systematically testing offers, ad copy, targeting, creative
templates, and so forth. I couldn’t get a single one to work. And in a
previous life I worked on Yahoo!’s internal analytics team—our job was to
optimize traffic.

I finally came to this realization: People on Facebook won’t pay for anything.
They don’t have credit cards, they don’t want credit cards, and they are not
interested in shopping."

I found this out the hard way too. Trying to do legitimate business on a
social network is like trying to sell life insurance at a night club. People
just aren't in the right frame of mind when they are there to respond to it.

This is why Facebook's self-serve ad platform will never amount to anything.
It will only be able to sell to platform games, dating sites, and maybe some
t-shirts.

~~~
jbenz
I've tried to sell t-shirts via Facebook ads, without much luck. Actually, a
couple years ago when Facebook Ads were called Facebook Fliers, and there was
very little competition, we sold a ton of t-shirts.

This "insider's confession" is extremely contradictory. He starts about by
saying "People on Facebook won’t pay for anything".

And then he closes by saying that once the legit advertisers start to grow on
Facebook, it will push the scammers out. How are legit advertisers going to be
able to do that if no one on Facebook buys anything, regardless of the
targeting? And then he claims the legit guys will be able to afford $10-50
CPMs. I can't imagine that will actually happen. Maybe it will, but as of now,
people are on Facebook to talk and share with their friends.

If a business wants to be successful on Facebook, then it needs to be
successful in the old school real world way: word-of-mouth. Make an awesome
product, get people talking about it, and you'll see lots of Facebook traffic
and conversions.

------
vaksel
That's the problem with affiliate offers, the legit ones don't make any money,
so after a few months you either decide to join the scammers, or you pack up
and cut your losses.

Facebook can't really fix this. The affiliates are always 2 steps ahead of
them. If you get banned as an affiliate, it literally takes like 5 minutes to
setup a new account.

~~~
patio11
The problem is not so much with the affiliate marketing channel and more with
the fact that you're, fundamentally, trying to extract money -- that is, hard
US currency -- out of someone who is unwilling to pay money for your service.
There are no two ways around this for the Facebook game case: at the end of
the day, someone has to pay. It has to be the user, or someone selling
something to the user. But the user can't legitimately buy anything. So if
you're paying to advertise something to that user, you're either a) stupid and
going to be exiting the market shortly or b) intent on scamming them.

It amazes me how little people who putatively work in businesses on the
Internet understand about Internet marketing. I understand, given that it
often resembles Satan's seedy underbelly, but if you are involved in marketing
on the Internet (do you sell ad inventory? Congrats, welcome to the party) you
need to understand at least this much: there is no legitimate way to extract
$X from users who don't have $X to spend.

Everything else in the discussion is, like Jason from Hot or Not said, a
smokescreen.

Incidentally, affiliate marketing makes the most sense for products which have
extraordinarily high margins. Those are the ones in which the
advertiser/vendor has the most amount of money to split with his affiliate,
who then has the most amount of money to pay for traffic acquisition (by
paying FarmVille or some intermediary service or buying AdWords or whatever).
There are many legitimate products which have high margins associated with
them -- software, for example -- but the field also tends to attract scams.

Software is actually almost the perfect legitimate affiliate good, because the
margin for downloadable software is essentially 100% less transactional costs.
If you don't see software offers, you can be pretty sure that the scams have
taken over. Why don't you see software offers? Two reasons: you can't
outcompete the vendor and affiliates (in this scenario) add essentially no
value so as soon as there are two of them they'll bid away all their profits.
(Edit to add: there are scenarios outside the scope of ScamVille in which an
affiliate can actually add value. Ask me some other time.)

For example, pretend I offered you $15 to generate sales of my $30 software.
If I had exactly one affiliate, and they paid some World of Dragonfarming
Online game to give dragon eggs to people who bought my software, they might
be able to pay $5 for dragon eggs to generate the $30 sale ($15 commission)
and keep $10. However, as soon as I have two affiliates, the market collapses
instantly, because both players outbid each other: affiliate #2 offers $6 in
dragon eggs, affiliate #1 offers $7 ... somebody gets to $15 and the
affiliates find themselves disintermediated. (Note that I could, incidentally,
buy the eggs myself if you prove that this concept works, and I will always be
able to outbid you because I make ~$29 per sale, not $15. Affiliates hate
this, mostly because it happens so often.)

Do you see how the math virtually demands that there is no honest money to be
made in this, even selling a good which is the paradigmatic best case for the
model? That, plus the fact that very few Facebookers want to actually fork
over $30 for their dragon eggs, is why the dishonest money always wins out.

Further note: the best point in the article is the one about mixing different
streams of traffic together. It is like a dishonest factory which cuts their
hamburgers with sawdust. (The Jungle, for the information age.)

~~~
frig
Overall there's nothing I disagree with in what you wrote.

One thing worth point out though is that affiliate marketing is a huge force-
multiplier for the company selling the product, which is why it exists in the
first place.

If you have software (or whatever) you're trying to sell and you _don't_ do an
affiliate program your advertising budget is basically limited to your cash on
hand.

If you run an affiliate program you can potentially get _other_ suckers to
spend _their_ resources advertising _your product_ on _speculation_ ; you only
pay those marketers who _successfully_ make sales, and get the other
advertising _for free_.

A cute corollary is that you have to be tracking what they do tightly enough
that you can reverse engineer the successful affiliates' strategies and self-
implement them.

So affiliate marketing isn't going anywhere, but outside of the inevitable
outliers the economics of it are such that the major profits will be made in
scammy products, and thus the bulk of successful affiliate marketers will be
marketing scams or worse.

------
paulbaumgart
How does the "Give up their phone number" scam work? How do you "[bill] $20 a
month" based on that?

Do I need to be even more paranoid about filling out web forms than I thought?

Edit: It seems it's the same mechanism that allows things like Collect calls
to be billed to the receiving party. So I guess it has legitimate uses- there
just needs to be a better way to keep it from being abused, apparently.
<http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/cramming.html>

~~~
ableal
Getting the telecomm companies out of the banking (money transfer) business
would be a good idea. Receiving a share of the scammers' profits is bound to
distort their notion of what is proper.

Otherwise we'll need guardians with big sticks (racketeering charges, punitive
damages, etc.) to protect the most vulnerable from predatory scammers. Which
then leads to other problems, such as the sticks being used for other purposes
...

------
diN0bot
> "I generated millions of dollars from these offers on Facebook – I am not
> proud of it, but it was very lucrative."

WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

as soon as people stop doing things they are not proud of, which we might
rephrase as not doing things they are _ashamed_ of, the world will be a better
place. humanity, sometimes you really drop the ball.

~~~
mahmud
Leave the morals out of it and the market will eventually "fix" things. Let
facebook get bogged down with spam, we have no moral responsibility to keep it
clean, and this will give a chance to someone to create something with better
privacy and anti-spam regulations.

~~~
diN0bot
i don't buy this. advertising in general is a huge and successful business. i
don't see it fixing itself, especially if allowed to run purely by short-term
greed than ethics. if you have kids then you know just how dman persuasive
advertisements are--they create need where there isn't any. furthermore, the
US government is strongly effected by rich corporations. if only big
journalism were as biased and non-money grubbing as the watchdog it was meant
to be.

i'm not sure what you mean by "fix" things on its own. around the turn of the
century the US enacted some incredible policy to keep corporations in check
(no child labor, anti-trust, etc). we now rely on public opinion (assuming
there is some transparency and consumer advocating!) to prevent corporations
from abusing lax human rights policy elsewhere.

ultimately, users are too easy to exploit. they get hit by smart
advertisements from a young age. by the time they are adults they could
believe anything. people put up with crap because they are trying to
accomplish other goals, don't have the time to become savy, and they get used
to things. it's pretty tough to change the culture against the folks
controlling the culture.

there are some positive changes in recent culture. for example, more and more
consumers care about fair traide and other social and environmental policies
of the corporations whose products they buy. unfortunately, without
transparency, we've levelled off with corporations "green washing" and
mislabelling their goods (not a new tactic). the idea that consumers have the
real [purchasing] power is crap in implementation.

in the end though, we're talking about _scams_ not advertisements. that is
where ethics and "crossing the line" should come into the picture.
traditionally speaking, consumers have a hard time responding proactively
against scams. if it weren't for consumer advocacy groups (typically non-
profit, as it turns out) that help consumers take scammers to court or lobby
government on behalf of consumers, then people would be screwed. that just
reminded me of some scammy private insurance companies, so i think i'll stop
talking here.

~~~
mahmud
_ultimately, users are too easy to exploit. they get hit by smart
advertisements from a young age. by the time they are adults they could
believe anything._

Never gonna happen. The more aggressive advertisers get, the more acute
people's ad-blindness becomes.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blindness>

There is no better classifier than the human mind; people will automatically
start to filter whatever that's pushed at them .. until someone finds a new
virgin technique and the cycle repeats again.

We can safely go through commercial fads without involving government or
religion; the greedy will risk big money and make or lose big money, the rest
of mankind goes on amused and catered to.

~~~
anigbrowl
This is true, but it's rather like saying 'why worry about pollution,
evolution will find a _modus vivendi_ '. I don't think advertising is evil,
but it can be terribly obnoxious. If you have attention deficit disorder then
it goes beyond mere annoyance and becomes exhausting.

The problem is that this kind of advertising is basically lying to people and
exploits their credulity (if they're foolish) or wastes their energy if they
filter it effectively. I can't help thinking 'christ, what an asshole' when I
read the guy's comment about not being proud of it - it's just more bullshit
designed to market his current line of services. If Mr Yu is really not proud
of it, I wish he'd put his money where his mouth is and give some of his
profits to PBS or creative commons projects or suchlike. Maybe he does, but
I'm afraid the whole article reminded me of 'confessions of a burglar'.

------
ivenkys
The amount of money being made is definitely a WTF , the moot point of course
is "There is a sucker born every minute".

Who are these people who are forking out real money to buy crap ?

~~~
frig
The parents of the kids who sign up for $10/month weekly horoscope sms
services.

~~~
ableal
And the ones raking in that cash, besides the scammers, are the telecomm
companies and Google/Facebook/etc. - the first get a cut, the second sell the
ads.

I used the ad feedback link to give Google a piece of my mind about their
collaboration in these scams. Seems that they, and the telcos, are willing to
keep raking in the cash until their name is mud.

