31–40 of 322 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m curious why the author didn’t take this to court? Perhaps it can evolve into a class action lawsuit. That would teach FB and other FAANGs.
The author is fully dependent from FB. He cannot bite the hand that feeds him. I think it’s a smart move to reach the front page of HN before taking this to court.
That is a serious amount of money. Are Facebook ads really that effective? The final paragraph makes me sad - this company is entirely at the mercy of Facebook.
> The final paragraph makes me sad - this company is entirely at the mercy of Facebook. The content is up, go read. Shared.com, fun.shared.com, see if you would ever want their headlines in your news feed.
Most likely, one of your competitors negotiated a deal where you were deplatformed as a condition. $57M over 13/14 years, or $100M right now... easy choice for Facebook.
Is that really the most likely? I'd suggest it's much more likely that they tripped some automated spam protection or a moderator thought they looked suspicious, than there's a conspiracy against the company by a competitor. That conspiracy would be of a high reputational risk to Facebook and the competitor, and would have a paper-trail in contracts that guarantee Facebook that ad revenue for the deplatforming. It se…
Let me be clear, I absolutely despise Facebook, but as I understand it, they are massively under fire from all sorts of governments over moderating the content which is posted on their platforms. There is a chance that this business knew they were doing something borderline dodgy in a grey area and Facebook started to weed those "bad" actors out in the moment of heat. I'm not implying that this is the case for sure, but it's not entirely impossible to imagine. Perhaps it's good that when governments take action and put pressure on FAANGs that they are even prepared to cancel a 57M customer if that means staying in business for themselves.
I cannot wrap my head around how that could even be possible? They mention they had FB representatives physically received at their offices. Couldn't they join those directly? I expect that if you spent 57 mio $ in any business, the minimum would be to have a direct telephone contact with a sales rep / account manager and to review the relationship quarterly.
The ~$60million is over 15 years, so it's about $330k/month on average, which is still a very substantial amount of money, but at "Facebook scale" this is pocket money you find in the sofa; their revenue is about $5.8 billion a month . For Facebook, the effect is like refusing to serve a customer their coffee at a coffee shop. I suppose that's the real problem with these kind of issues; you see the same on e.g. YouTu…
> Facebook has systematically shut down our 2 small businesses during a pandemic and economic crisis without explanation. If you've spent $57MM on Facebook ads, are you still considered a "small business"? Perhaps I'm out of touch. I think the warning about building your business on someone else's land still applies but I'm not sure how you get around that when so much of the world's attention is controlled by a few…
There aren't really any businesses which have sovereign territory
I cannot wrap my head around how that could even be possible? They mention they had FB representatives physically received at their offices. Couldn't they join those directly? I expect that if you spent 57 mio $ in any business, the minimum would be to have a direct telephone contact with a sales rep / account manager and to review the relationship quarterly.
The ~$60million is over 15 years, so it's about $330k/month on average, which is still a very substantial amount of money, but at "Facebook scale" this is pocket money you find in the sofa; their revenue is about $5.8 billion a month . For Facebook, the effect is like refusing to serve a customer their coffee at a coffee shop. I suppose that's the real problem with these kind of issues; you see the same on e.g. YouTu…
FB revenue in 2019 was 70e9$. I also assume that Freebies spending was not constant over the 16 years. So their spending represented almost 1/10000 of FB revenue.
I agree you can probably afford to lose that as a business owner but you probably can't be "meh, whatever" either. I expect that a decision of that scale would have probably be considered by many people / relatively highly ranked employee.
(At least, at that scale, I wouldn't give the authority to two low level support staff and an algorithm to delete 1/10000 of my global revenues...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what do you have in mind other than Facebook and Google as online advertising (actually any advertising) that has the same reach?
believe it or not, advertising existed before 2010.