Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 100 posts

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#71

Post by AznHisoka »

runarb wrote: post #66
ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #64

Is it just me, or do other people actually LOVE this new trend of plugging your product/work/yourself through interesting blog posts? Like, I don't care how much $$$ this guy could spend on advertising --- this blog post is certainly far more effective in getting me to buy the product. I learned something, I was entertained, I now "trust" this individual, I got a great demo of the product's use... love it!

Personally I did feel a little cheated when I realised that the article was an advertisement. Content marketing like this blurs out what is someone's genuine opinion and what is advertisement. I do not like it. Where I live, in Norway one has to clearly mark content marketing as advertisement or risk some steep fines.

I didn't even know there was a product to buy after I read it

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#72

Post by jack9 »

AJ007 wrote: post #68
stevoski wrote: post #55

When Google got into advertising, they were relaxed about what ads they accepted. They happily ran just about any advert. But then two things happened. 1) the scammers came. 2) governments started holding Google accountable for running ads for online gambling and prescription medication. Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo) had to pay large fines for running ads for products and companies that governments saw as illegal.…

Facebook's ad platform is very mature, it was launched in 2007. I think Facebook is able to let more questionable stuff run in part because the micro-targeting makes it easy to disperse bad stuff to narrowly targeted audiences. On Google, investigators could search well known pharmaceutical terms and it was plain as day the advertisers were breaking US law. It is kind of like putting crack for sale in your storefront…

Generally, the older an advertising platform the less mature it is. DFP is horrid and Liverail is a bit better than AdJuggler but less sophisticated than AOL's or SpotX.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#73

Post by CaveTech »

AznHisoka wrote: post #70
paulpauper wrote: post #61

It could also mean that the fraudster made enough money and decided to bail on the campaign and tear down all of their infrastructure. Tough to confirm either way. Or the ads simply did not generate a positive ROI. I have read that Facebook advertising (especially for US traffic) is very expensive and tends to not convert well. I often see people run Facebook ads for non-scammy purposes (for example three months ago…

This. It's all fine and well he's getting lots of clicks but is he actually converting them to revenue? If all he's doing is an ad arbitrage mode (i.e. Hope visitors click on Adsense ads) he's doomed because that will never succeed.

To both you and the parent... I can promise you he made money. Affiliate advertising is rampant on Facebook because of how profitable it is. They do anton of shady things because Facebook actively tried to shut them down. This person is 't doing view arbitrage, theyre clearly doing affiliate marketing and I know it accounts for no less than several hundred million per year in revenue for Facebook.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#74

Post by tehwebguy »

madeofpalk wrote: post #32
tehwebguy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy it, it's an oversight IMO. Marketers can buy domains if they won't want to display a sub domain, and Facebook can check the final destination landing page. I mean, they already do! Every time you make a new ad they scrape the final destination for meta tags and content.

Same thing still applies - they don't want ctvnewsmarketing.com appearing as the domain.

Who doesn't, the marketers?

I'm saying they should have to suck it up and buy the domain they want to display.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#75

Post by joesmo »

I see a lot of posts suggesting what FB should do about this (as if they have incentives to change things; they don't) but perhaps we should focus on informing end users about the dangers of ads and how to properly use an ad-blocker. What would really be great is for the tech community to provide solutions that regular non-techie users can use. For example, if Firefox started bundling anti-ad functionality into its browser.

The age of debating whether ads are acceptable or not is long passed; ads are not acceptable because they are malware. Period. We should be teaching people how to avoid malware and that means avoiding all ads. How can we expect FB to fix this problem when they are causing the problem and they are profiting from it? On the other hand, putting ad blocking technology into the next Firefox would not only fix a huge chunk of the problem, but also send a clear message from a huge fraction of web users that malware is not acceptable in any form, including in ad form. I can't think of a better solution.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#77

Post by kevincox »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #64

Is it just me, or do other people actually LOVE this new trend of plugging your product/work/yourself through interesting blog posts? Like, I don't care how much $$$ this guy could spend on advertising --- this blog post is certainly far more effective in getting me to buy the product. I learned something, I was entertained, I now "trust" this individual, I got a great demo of the product's use... love it!

In general I don't mind the idea but this article sounded forced. I don't think I needed a run down of how their product worked to be told that Facebook lets advertisers pick a display URL that doesn't have to be related to the target URL.

If they just said that and put the ad target to their domain I wouldn't have minded.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#79

Post by deprave »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #64

Is it just me, or do other people actually LOVE this new trend of plugging your product/work/yourself through interesting blog posts? Like, I don't care how much $$$ this guy could spend on advertising --- this blog post is certainly far more effective in getting me to buy the product. I learned something, I was entertained, I now "trust" this individual, I got a great demo of the product's use... love it!

I hate ads and sponsored content but, like you, I loved this article. It's an easy read and the product doesn't play a fundamental role in the technical analysis or getting the message across. It's not shoved in my face. I learned something new (ad fraud on Facebook) and became aware of this guy's product without hating the process. Good balance.

One could argue that it's a huge piece to get a one-liner across, but I feel that's true about a lot of news stories, so base rate fallacy applies.

Re: Fraudulent Advertising on Facebook

#80

Post by cdcarter »

tehwebguy wrote: post #74
madeofpalk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing still applies - they don't want ctvnewsmarketing.com appearing as the domain.

Who doesn't, the marketers? I'm saying they should have to suck it up and buy the domain they want to display.

The issue is that they are hosting their pages on a 3rd party platform (HubSpot, Pardot, Unbounce, &c) and don't want to point root DNS at the landing page host or put bounce pages TO landing pages from the main site. They just wanna set up a pages. cname and run with it.
Post reply on HN