

Facebook 'likes' and adverts' value doubted - molecule
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18813237

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netcan
I'm an advertiser and have been in buying online ads for about 6 years. I'm
disappointed with Facebook.

It's not directly about roi or fraud or anything like that, not fundamentally
(though obviously no one will advertise long term with a poor roi). It's more
about vision. Adwords & Overture had some sort of vision about advertising
online so do lots of (mostly unsuccessful upstarts). I really do think that
with all of their problems they did a great job. Adwords is a great ad
platform. It's more meritocratic. Scales down nicely for small/local
businesses and is genuinely useful to the people seeing/clicking the ads.

Facebook on the other hand seems content to ride the buzz of companies keen to
figure out this new medium. They don't seem to be taking advantage of it to
implement some solid idea.

It seems like they have no interesting ideas about how their contribution to
the communication-entertainment-advertising ecosystem looks. They don't really
seem to understand themselves how/why/what their system (which is inevitably a
new kind of advertising) is supposed to be working.

The @facebook email address mess is a kind of analogy. Think you can improve
on email/communication? Great. We need it. Think Facebook is a unique position
to do so? Great. I agree (at least for some people). Figure out a way of doing
it that people want. Don't trick people into something that feels like its for
the company instead of the consumer.

~~~
dasil003
It's because “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build
better services.”

~~~
wutbrodo
The problem there is that they don't seem to be intent on building better
services either. It's been a while now that they've had incredible resources
to work with: top-tier tech talent, a captive audience of unprecedented scale,
etc. And (possibly excluding timeline), they've done absolutely nothing
interesting with their product. The argument that they're bad at monetizing
because they're focusing their energies on improving their product is a bit
hard to swallow given that their product hasn't really improved (or at the
very least, does so at a glacial pace).

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throwaway032496
I was asked to look into some of the data from the BBC Correspondent's site
earlier this week and was made an administrator to do so. I'm a member here,
but am using a throwaway ID - because I'm sure there'll be a backlash to what
I am going to reveal.

Now I want to state for the record, I actually like Facebook, I don't have an
axe to grind, and I really believe that MZ's intentions are truly honorable. I
would like to believe he knows nothing about this, but I'm not naïve - he owns
57%, and he's a very very clever man. But I am disappointed.

So to explain...

Because the BBC has a wide non-tech audience some of what was found was not
fully revealed mainly because it's so difficult to explain to the general
public the tech behind this issues raised.

The main point was missed both by TechCrunch, and many commentators on Twitter
etc. and I guess general fans of Facebook. The point being that at first the
ads were targeted to UK and US people. Hardly any clicks were reported meaning
that advertising with this targeted criteria is pointless, and in fact more
pointless than expanding the reach to countries that will artificially boost
your return. The clicks/likes though high in number will never bear fruit,
that much is not disputed by the BBC. But it begs the question if both
"settings" are useless then what's the point in spending any money at all with
Facebook?

Before I get a barrage of hate mail remember I had access to the real data.
The BBC describes exactly how you can replicate the experiment for yourself,
and I guarantee you'll find the same results. What's more you'll discover the
same profiles are liking your fake page the same as they liked the BBCs
virtualbagel. Take it from me.

What's more the list of Likers contained people who appear to spend their
lives clicking likes. These people are clicking between 50-100 likes per day,
all day, every day. In the 10 or so days in July many had racked up literally
300-1500 clicks. It doesn't take a genius to work out these people are being
paid to click on ads.

Remember we're talking third world countries where it makes economic sense to
pay someone a-dollar-a-day to click on ads all day, when the return is so
massive.

The question is who is paying? Who really stands to benefit? Logically it just
can't be a third party. This is out-and-out click-fraud.

In addition to all this, and I can't reveal too much (because it's still being
investigated for later publication) is that there appears to be evidence that
the process is also subject to some automation from within Facebook. We have
comparative evidence that shows how click automation would look if it was
carried out by a third party and how it would look if it was carried out
inside Facebook. Unfortunately for Facebook the evidence is showing that again
it's driven from the inside.

I'm actually quite sad, because it doesn't have to be this way, but from what
I have analysed it is, what it is. If you don't believe me do the same
exercise and look at the data.

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tatsuke95
> _"Earlier this year Facebook revealed that about 5-6% of its 901 million
> users might be fake - representing up to 54 million profiles."_

I've been singing this tune for a bit. In my experience, this is a big
problem. If Facebook is saying this is the actual number, then consider is
much higher. Facebook, as well as every player in their ecosystem, is
economically incentivized to inflate the usage numbers. It's why Facebook is
"worth" what it's worth, and how every single application on the platform is
measured for investment. Games are literally ranked by their daily active
users.

I spent some time combing through the data of an oldish FB game (as an
employee), with about 300k MAU and 150k DAU. We figured that about 40% of the
accounts playing on our game daily were fake, created solely to take advantage
of any mechanics where it was advantageous to have more friends. Some people
would have 10 or more accounts. Now there are businesses sprouting up in
countries where labour costs are cheap who sell "likes"; you can buy thousands
for less than a hundred bucks. Mostly fake accounts.

And this is only the blatantly fake accounts. What about the people who
actively, honestly use Facebook, but have lied about minor details that are
_important_ to advertisers? Things like their age, sex, name, jobs, location,
whatever? I did this myself.

And yet, the value of the advertising (and Facebook directly) is derived from
these measures.

> _"One, going by the name Agung Pratama Sevenfoldism, showed his date of
> birth as 1997 and said he had been a manager at Chevron in 2010.

>Mr Tinmouth said this seemed "unlikely"._

I'd say.

~~~
qq66
Even if half of Facebook profiles are fake, that's still 500 million users --
hard for an advertiser to ignore.

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dangrossman
I don't care if 50% of Facebook profiles are fake as long as the long-term ROI
of the advertising is positive. Measure the impact on actual goals, not
intermediates like number of likes. Facebook's worked for me; I've been
advertising there consistently for about a year now.

<http://i.imgur.com/r0RQ5.png>

As far as disproportionate responses from the Phillippines and Egypt, if you
don't limit the audience you show your ad to, you're gonna get bad results
everywhere, not just Facebook.

~~~
barrkel
It's not enough to measure the ROI on the advertising; the ROI needs to be
higher than the alternatives. In other words, are you considering opportunity
cost?

~~~
dangrossman
That makes little sense. Placing new advertising takes almost no time at all.
It's not like you need to consult the design department; your only creative on
Facebook is 100 characters of text. One employee can create dozens of new
placements each day. You advertise everywhere that's effective at the same
time, not just the single most effective place.

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cinbun8
Any ad network is susceptible to this sort of fraud. A group from China
managed to amass large sums from Google ads until they were caught and shut
down a year or two back (Techcrunch ran an article about this). I am sure
there are some that still manage to do it successfully. The true value of a
click is one that is quantifiable beyond likes. * How many users signed up
because of the click with a valid email ? Captchas / honeypots can be used to
filter spammers. * Of these users that signed up, how many are active ? * How
many users bought the product as a result of the click ? etc You many need to
drill down deeper to avoid some layers of spam users. But yeah, the way the
value is measured should not stop with how many users 'liked' a product. It
needs to go deeper.

~~~
James2k
Agreed and Facebook does a better job than most to keep this to a minimum. If
you take any time whatsoever on an ad you can reduce this further by ommitting
developing countries. A valid like is more valuable than other ad goals
because conversions can receive future messages from the advertiser for free.
Disagree with most of the article.

~~~
justinschuh
The irony here is that the above user was created five minutes before the
comment was posted.

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Zenst
Valid doubt as well as they did a little experiment

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4238075>

Moral being, target your marketing in trusted markets and verify any feedback
for validity and if you too find that flase people are comming as a result of
the marketing, then it is perhaps time to ask for a refund. I'm sure even
facebook don't want nor wish people to lie and cheat to give a false
impression and in that they would be more than happy to refund your expences.
Especialy as you are checking simple details that they should of picked up
early on by them.

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SoftwareMaven
_"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know
which half."_ \- John Wanamaker

~~~
jarek
Yeah, exactly. Anyone who reckons Facebook stats are bad should look at the TV
ad market.

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dsirijus
Most of the Facebook agencies did their own inflation of Pages like count, and
many users have created their own fb fake user nets to gain advantage of the
campaigns that these agencies provided.

Just look at the <http://www.freelancer.com/jobs/Facebook/>. How do you think
those jobs are possible otherwise?

That being said, it doesn't work as well as it did in 2008-09, so I see this
as news 2 years old.

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mootothemax
I've heard one reason for knowingly buying fake fans is so that you can claim
a vanity url - e.g. <http://facebook.com/my_company> . Strange, as I think you
only need 20 "likes", but when I see offers on fiverr to give 100 likes for
$5, it starts making sense to me.

~~~
fooandbarify
Like all things Facebook I'm sure it wasn't always this way (and won't always
be), but these days you can claim any Facebook URL you want for a new page if
it isn't already taken, regardless of "Likes".

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nmridul
Nothing surprising. Just visit Fiverr.com and you can buy 100+ facebook likes
for $5. And you will get likes from US, UK too.

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wiradikusuma
What is the incentive for those bots to like/click the ads? The stakeholders
are (1) Facebook users (might be fake/bots) who like/click ads (2) Facebook
(3) Companies promoting their product in FB (4) Agencies which put the ads on
company behalf.

(2) and (4) have the monetary incentive.

~~~
nbm
It could also be criminal groups that are trying to make their profiles appear
less fake.

I worked with the team that fight spam, scams, and the fake accounts that
distribute them when I started at Facebook, and they expend a lot of time
writing code and building machine learning models to detect fake accounts.
There would be no fake accounts if there wasn't a massive financial upside to
it, and so they do the strangest things to try avoid the detection.

You can read a bit about what the team does at
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/ldg/a10-stein.p...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/ldg/a10-stein.pdf)

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BlackNapoleon
Seems like this will always be the case since social media isn't tangible
anyways.

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andys627
Crappy title - should focus on issue of likes from fake accounts, not value of
any like

