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Facebook Climbs to 1.59B Users, Beats Q4 Estimates with $5.8B Revenue

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Re: Facebook Climbs to 1.59B Users, Beats Q4 Estimates with $5.8B Revenue

#71

Post by Steko »

physcab wrote: post #57
Steko wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does SuperCell earn money on FB's platform? Afaik all of their games are iOS and Android only and I've never seen a display ad of any kind in Boom Beach (the only SC game I've played) although admittedly I don't sign in via FB.

Supercell, like most big mobile gaming companies, make their money on in-app purchases. Someone leaked SC's internal dashboard 2 years ago [1]. At the time they were making $5M a day in rev just in CoC. You can get App Annie estimates of revenue for other companies pretty easily, but last I checked SC was able to dramatically increase LTV of users over the years so this has likely grown. [1] https://recodetech.files.…

I'm not contesting that SC makes millions every day from in-app purchases, just pointing out that the money is presumably split with Apple and Google not Facebook. Although you can login to Clash of Clans with your Facebook account, it is not a Facebook game.

Re: Facebook Climbs to 1.59B Users, Beats Q4 Estimates with $5.8B Revenue

#72

Post by askafriend »

morgante wrote: post #51
cft wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have several accounts that I set up for research purposes with close to 5000 friends each, mostly 17-25. All friends became inactive in the last 4 years.

So you're basing a pretty huge assertion on a tiny and non-random sample?

That's exactly what he or she is doing.

Re: Facebook Climbs to 1.59B Users, Beats Q4 Estimates with $5.8B Revenue

#73

Post by hayksaakian »

throwaway198374 wrote: post #64
jrcii wrote: post #5

Hopefully for their investors' sake that revenue isn't significantly driven by click fraud, a rumor that's been circulating for years http://thesocialmediamonthly.com/startup-ceo-alleges-massive... * Is anyone aware of evidence of the extent of click fraud on Facebook? I see a lot of discussion about it but not a lot of data.

Sorry for the throwaway, I work in ad tech. Other posters are saying they see hardly any fraud on Facebook. My employer is a more traditional ad tech company (think exchange and direct buys) and we estimate 60-70% of our exchange inventory is fraudulent, and at least 15% of our impressions are delivered against fraudulent sites (of course we don't tell the customers). In reality the numbers are probably higher. The p…

unless you're talking about really sophisticated fraud, i think advertisers and publishers both care about it.

I'm on both sides of the coin.

As an advertiser, click fraud is obvious when I see a huge disparity between google analytics and the ad network. You'd have to put a lot of effort into sending fake traffic that actually engages with the advertiser's landing page.

As a publisher, I know that if I send a bunch of BS traffic to my advertisers they will blacklist me and starve my website.

Regarding your estimates, I agree for really broad traffic.

If your targeting options are very vague/loose you can buy ad traffic for very cheap, but you end up with a large number of click fraud.

Most advertisers should want to be as narrow as possible with their targeting. The tricky thing is that when everyone is bidding on the golden goose egg demographics the price jumps quickly.

In some cases, you're better off buying the 'general audience' traffic for pennies just because of sheer volume multiplied by chance.

Re: Facebook Climbs to 1.59B Users, Beats Q4 Estimates with $5.8B Revenue

#74

Post by ghshephard »

throwaway198374 wrote: post #64
jrcii wrote: post #5

Hopefully for their investors' sake that revenue isn't significantly driven by click fraud, a rumor that's been circulating for years http://thesocialmediamonthly.com/startup-ceo-alleges-massive... * Is anyone aware of evidence of the extent of click fraud on Facebook? I see a lot of discussion about it but not a lot of data.

Sorry for the throwaway, I work in ad tech. Other posters are saying they see hardly any fraud on Facebook. My employer is a more traditional ad tech company (think exchange and direct buys) and we estimate 60-70% of our exchange inventory is fraudulent, and at least 15% of our impressions are delivered against fraudulent sites (of course we don't tell the customers). In reality the numbers are probably higher. The p…

I would think that customers are reasonably sophisticated when it comes to stuff like this, particularly when they are spending real $$$. How difficult is it, for something like brand advertising, to do before/after poll's to discern how effective the dollar spend is in promoting a brand (with conversion to sales, it's even more trivial.)

Done properly, the customer doesn't actually care if 99% of the exchange inventory and impressions are fraudulent, as long as they accomplish whatever objectives they set out to.

Put more explicitly, if the objective for an advertiser (or, more likely, their agency) is to build awareness of a brand, they can measure a measure awareness among their target group, run a few million dollars of advertising, and then measure awareness again to see the difference. Done with enough customers, and enough programs, you start to get a very clear sense of where the dollar is best spent.

Re: Facebook Climbs to 1.59B Users, Beats Q4 Estimates with $5.8B Revenue

#75

Post by msellout »

Mahn wrote: post #11
julianpye wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is all about searching for results and Facebook is all about demography and thus brands. So Facebook is taking a lot of advertising budget to establish brands that used to be for print and television. Simple example: Diapers. By the time you have a baby, Facebook knows that you as a couple are expecting and you will see ads establishing relevant brands. You would never see those ads on Google, because at that…

I'll give another perspective: In my industry at least, Google has become incredibly expensive due to a few unicorns spending ridiculous amounts of money just to put competitors out of the game (because they have the money for that, even if it doesn't make sense from a unit economics point of view, and Google is cool with it). By contrast, Facebook remains very effective for the same kind of goals, at least for the m…

That's a contradiction. If some companies are "spending ridiculous amounts of money" on Google, that's evidence of increased revenue for Google. It's not hard to believe that both Google and Facebook are growing.

Re: Facebook Climbs to 1.59B Users, Beats Q4 Estimates with $5.8B Revenue

#76

Post by shostack »

nl wrote: post #58
467568985476 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which studies in particular?

Well there's one I'm involved with atm which is unpublished yet. But more broadly there are quite a lot of industry and industry-body sponsored ones, eg: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/online-video-ads-dr... http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Mobile-Video-Ads-Lift-Brand... https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?hl=en&q=video+ad+expos... will find more.

Can you share any details of the study you are involved in?

Re: Facebook Climbs to 1.59B Users, Beats Q4 Estimates with $5.8B Revenue

#77

Post by mintplant »

dang wrote: post #68
thieving_magpie wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool your jets there, sassafras. There is evidence of a downward trend, though probably not "most" teens. Enjoying the indignant platitudes though. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02...

Please don't be rude to others on HN, especially when you think they're wrong. The GP shouldn't have been so aggressive, but replying like this makes things worse. Your comment would be fine without its first and third sentences.

Maybe it's just me, but hostility and name-calling like this seems to have become more and more common on HN in the past couple of months or so.

Re: Facebook Climbs to 1.59B Users, Beats Q4 Estimates with $5.8B Revenue

#78

Post by shostack »

mbesto wrote: post #30
shostack wrote: post #23

The big question mark for me is whether FB will be the advertising giant to finally crack the attribution nut. You see, the age old problem of "I know I'm wasting half my budget, I just don't know which half" is still alive and well. These days, we have SO MUCH data about cross-channel attribution that it can be hard to plot a path forward (and that's if you are even aware of this concept and its implications). For t…

Are you familiar with conversion tracking? You can attribute conversion (checkout, sign-ups, etc) with clicking or viewing of FB ads. More details here: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/460491677335370

I appreciate you sharing your information as it came across as an honest attempt to be helpful, however I think you might find it helpful to read this post by Avinash Kaushik [1] and then reread my post. I do digital advertising for a living, and that post is what I recommend to all who are new to the concept of cross-channel attribution as it is a very complex topic from both a data, math, and business standpoint. Easily one of the biggest opportunities and problems in the ad industry at the moment (and has been for some time).

[1] http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/multi-channel-attribution-mod...

Re: Facebook Climbs to 1.59B Users, Beats Q4 Estimates with $5.8B Revenue

#79

Post by dang »

mintplant wrote: post #77
dang wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't be rude to others on HN, especially when you think they're wrong. The GP shouldn't have been so aggressive, but replying like this makes things worse. Your comment would be fine without its first and third sentences.

Maybe it's just me, but hostility and name-calling like this seems to have become more and more common on HN in the past couple of months or so.

I suspect that a couple months is too short a time frame to judge this—too prone to sample bias and normal fluctuation. But please keep flagging such comments when you see them. No one can read all the comments posted to HN, but we can and do read all the flagged ones.

In case anyone is wondering, the way you flag a comment is to click its timestamp to go to its page (a speed bump to prevent people from doing it impulsively), and then clicking 'flag' at the top. You need a small amount of karma (currently 31) before that link appears.

Re: Facebook Climbs to 1.59B Users, Beats Q4 Estimates with $5.8B Revenue

#80

Post by acchow »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #69
physcab wrote: post #24

Here's the thing that most people don't know unless they are in the "industry": * The gaming industry is most likely driving a lot of this growth. I'm sure Machine Zone and Supercell are doing between $5M - $10M a day on FB alone. * FB is re-defining attribution. They want to bring in big brands and are re-defining last-click to "Multi-touch". Their end game ofcourse is to say the reason why you decided to make a tri…

A lot of people misunderstood you. physcab isn't talking about gaming on Facebook. He's talking about Game of War and Clash of Clans, which are both mobile games. Like another poster has said, games are 75% of the top grossing on the App Store. And absolutely most of Facebook's revenue, if not literally all of it, is mobile gaming ads (especially slot machines). I'm not sure if the gaming industry is driving the grow…

> He's talking about Game of War and Clash of Clans, which are both mobile games. Like another poster has said, games are 75% of the top grossing on the App Store. And absolutely most of Facebook's revenue, if not literally all of it, is mobile gaming ads (especially slot machines).

This is false.

Facebook's revenue in 2015 was $17.9 billion. Total mobile gaming revenue for 2015 was approximately $25 billion [1]. Unless mobile game companies spend most of their revenue on Facebook ads, this can't be true.

[1] http://fortune.com/2015/01/15/mobile-console-game-revenues-2...

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