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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

#91

Post by archgoon »

acchow wrote: post #80
doctorpangloss wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]. Unl…

The poster claimed the growth was being driven by gaming. This quarter showed a 30% revenue increase over the previous year. If the gaming industry were to be responsible for the entire growth, they would only need to have spent 1.2 billion more than they had the previous year in Q4. If facebook were to see a 30% increase this year overall, they would only need to spend about $6 billion more this year (or about 25% of their profits).

Given that Supercell spends about 50% of their profits on marketing overall (which amounts to $500 million) this is plausible. Especially since you can further reduce the total cost by noting that physcab only stated that most of the growth was being fueled by gaming.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/27/why-king-and-supercell-spe...

EDIT: However, after reflecting on this, this seems entirely backwards. I believe that physcab was claiming that it was games displaying mobile ads. Thus Facebook is paying the gaming industry, not the other way around.

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

#92

Post by adventured »

AJ007 wrote: post #20
sly_foxx wrote: post #7

Facebook is the biggest scam for most businesses. 1) They've pulled bait and switch when they decided to charge to reach users that have already liked your page. Most of those users liked your page because you've posted a link to FB on your site. 2) Click fraud is rampant [1] 3) They make money on copyrighted videos + ripping off YouTube content creators [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag [2] https:/…

You are wrong on #1. The biggest con was Facebook selling those "likes" to your competitors. #2 addressed elsewhere #3 YouTube started through copyright violations and continues to benefit from copyrighted content today (if the rightsholders do not try to enforce.)

If the rights holders do not want to enforce take-downs on their content (eg because they're getting promotional value from it or otherwise), then it's not in any way wrong to benefit from said copyrighted content. In fact it's smart and appropriate to use copyrighted content in that case.

Just because something is copyrighted doesn't mean it's inherently or by default illegal or improper to use without permission - it means it may be.

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

#93

Post by ethanbond »

ghshephard wrote: post #74
throwaway198374 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 invent…

Your hand wavy usage of "measure awareness" is the problem. How do you do such a thing?

When you're advertising on multiple channels, even if you did have a solid measurement of awareness (you don't), you still wouldn't know what was responsible.

This is the appeal behind things like Facebook ads. It seems you have a very clear sense of what return you're getting because there's such precise targeting and tracking. The issue is that neither of those have anything to do with the first portion of your comment: measuring awareness. You still need to measure awareness objectively and no one knows how to do it.

The people best equipped and most ready to act like they do, however, is — you guessed it — Facebook and similar ad networks!

Besides, the ad industry has been kept afloat with exactly the type of behavior that grandparent describes for decades if not centuries. What makes you think they're more sophisticated now?

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

#94

Post by physcab »

adventured wrote: post #90
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…

Machine Zone and Supercell are not doing $3.6 billion per year on Facebook. That's pretty absurd to claim without backing it up with a lot of proof.

I couldn't edit my comment but you're right. I meant $5M-$10M per month. But the mobile gaming industry as a whole is a huge revenue driver, probably 20%-30% of FB's quarterly rev.

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

#96

Post by downandout »

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…

> FB still is the only reliable source for advanced targeting of ads. This has massive impact on ROI for performance marketers.

A few years ago, a report came out saying that approximately 6% of Facebook advertisers were actually seeing a positive ROI. A more recent survey of small businesses [1] showed that 41% felt they received some positive ROI. These numbers suggest that Facebook advertisers are likely losing billions of dollars per year overall. There just happens to be a large glut of capital out there willing to chase metrics other than ROI right now - things like brand recognition and app installs. Eventually though, some people are going to notice that they are losing money, and the gravy train may at least slow down.

[1] http://www.manta.com/resources/research/social-media-marketi...

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

#97

Post by ethanbond »

arasmussen wrote: post #17
sly_foxx wrote: post #7

Facebook is the biggest scam for most businesses. 1) They've pulled bait and switch when they decided to charge to reach users that have already liked your page. Most of those users liked your page because you've posted a link to FB on your site. 2) Click fraud is rampant [1] 3) They make money on copyrighted videos + ripping off YouTube content creators [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag [2] https:/…

Big spenders do a lot of due diligence to make sure that the money they spend is actually giving them a positive return. It's not like businesses just throw millions down the drain and hope it gives them results. Facebook is working great for them and it is not a scam otherwise businesses wouldn't be spending billions on advertising there every quarter.

Or, as pointed out in a comment above, everybody is lying to everybody and the only loser is the customer. The customer may still find advertising to be a net win, but they have no clue to what degree it is such.

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

#99

Post by nl »

shostack wrote: post #76
nl wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No details (embargoes etc), but the short version is that videos ads work.

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

#100

Post by babuskov »

adventured wrote: post #92
AJ007 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong on #1. The biggest con was Facebook selling those "likes" to your competitors. #2 addressed elsewhere #3 YouTube started through copyright violations and continues to benefit from copyrighted content today (if the rightsholders do not try to enforce.)

If the rights holders do not want to enforce take-downs on their content (eg because they're getting promotional value from it or otherwise), then it's not in any way wrong to benefit from said copyrighted content. In fact it's smart and appropriate to use copyrighted content in that case. Just because something is copyrighted doesn't mean it's inherently or by default illegal or improper to use without permission -…

You could repeat the exact same sentences for Facebook usage of videos as well.

Both FB and YT are benefiting from copyrighted content used illegally. The copyright owners don't have time to search and hunt down every last one of thousands of copies of their videos posted. Even when they do, the new ones just pop up a week later and people uploading are getting smarter with various tricks that prevent automatic detection.

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