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After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

jordan-shared.medium.com

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Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#91
Boy that "Emma C" author sure knows everything about anything. This is the lowest form of shallow content that receives millions of dollars to be in front, surpassing good stories by authors with notoriety on the subject.

Facebook is the place where some of my "acquaintances" learned that Bill Gates gives them COVID, that everything is a conspiracy designed to take something from them, that the vaccine will implant them nano-chips or 5G "reactions" and sleeper nano-whatever that will wake-up on the right frequency.

I hate that platform because it gives a big mouth to everyone, to the bad apple that can now infect the rest over the internet. One look at shared.com homepage and I knew...I couldn't be bothered with their story.

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#92

Let's be fair here. Shared.com is in the business of producing and distributing crap content. That's a subjective term, but it's like the supreme court ruling on pornography, you'll know it when you see it. These guys most likely "skirt the line" to just operate as a mediocre and crappy content distribution network, that at scale, makes a lot of money because there is a certain subset of the population that will eat…

Facebook is absolutely full to the brim with “crap content”. Crap content happens to be what drives engagement, so hosting crap content is a large part of Facebook’s business model. You’re speaking with a pretty authoritative tone there as though you’re absolutely sure that Facebook has had a change of heart and only wants to host quality content, and there’s no other reason why the pages were removed. Do you have so…

I would go so far as to say that "crap content" is Facebook's entire business model.

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#93
post #87
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right about content. But in that case FB should have clearly communicated about violations for those pages and given a chance to correct them. Also taking down personal accounts seems more like an automated action where a graph of related accounts are taken down.

It's not even about violations (which there may not have been), just some kind of explanation. "Hey we don't want to be involved in this kind of content, we're making a judgment call to disallow it."

With regards to this, my point was that Facebook doesn't want to get into a long drawn out discussion with whataboutisms and splitting hairs on policy.

They made a business decision to move on from this content platform. I love to hate on facebook with the best of them, but they really don't "owe" anyone anything.

There seems to be this pervasive attitude in technology circles that platforms "owe" other businesses and individuals something when they build businesses on top of said platforms. Just because you spent 54MM in ads on a platform doesn't entitle you to anything when a legal or business decision has to be made. Is it crappy not to communicate and give an explanation...? you bet it is. Did that 54MM in spend generate anything for Shared... you bet it did. Everyone was a winner until Facebook moved on.

I suspect that Facebook and Shared working to negotiate out of this will just result in a lot of spinning wheels, ammunition collection on both sides to pursue legal remedies, and nothing of real value changing. Facebook said we're moving on. Done.

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#95
> Facebook had taken action against me, personally, that one assumes are reserved for the worst in our society — criminals, pedophiles and conspiracy theorists.

Lumping in conspiracy theorists with pedophiles? This guy is an ass, his business was probably barely legitimate, and I don't feel sorry for him in the slightest.

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#97
Dig deeper, the reason Facebook nixed you is that Zuck is going to reproduce your content, copycat you, and wipe you out.

Apple is nixing Facebooks ecosystem from preying on Apple customers data, and the Zuck whines loud and clear with full page ads in major newspapers.

Welcome to 2121.

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#98
post #9

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.

They do say that they no longer have that avenue in the article: > I have visited their offices and have hosted their representatives at mine. I still cherish my relationships with all of them. > Over the past few years, however, the lines of communication have gone dark. Instead of our trusted Facebook partners, we found ourselves trying to communicate with 3rd party contractors who didn’t always share our goals and…

This is not the first time I have heard something like "There was little interest in helping us understand new Facebook policies or what we were expected to do to comply with them. " This is generally said when the new policies are intentionally designed to keep out a whole niche of shady behavior, so that complying would require to abandon their core business model; i.e. it's not really expected that they would comply, the policies are explicitly written to stop doing business with them and also every future company like theirs.

If they could work out something with the customer representatives to mostly keep doing what they want to do while fitting within the letter of the policy, that would just indicate a bug in the policy text that needs to be fixed.

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#99
Over years of being a CEO of social media agency I have heard about a lot of such situations. Also we were helping small businesses that was harmed by Facebook actions. Sometimes it was possible to fix it, sometimes not.

In this particular case I strongly believe the platform developed was competing with Facebook and it may be the cause Facebook shut it down.

It is my personal opinion however and may be not true.

But all of my experience and knowledge tells me so.

There might be that public pressure will force Facebook to reenable the business and I hope it will happen.

However there are a lot of businesses that was shut down and died because there they wasn't able to put a pressure on Facebook.

It is the main reason why Facebook in particular should be prevented from making more harm, and we should all do everything what is possible to not be dependant on 3rd party companies.

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#100
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

$330k/month means that you could have multiple employees specifically and solely tasked with managing this one account. It is not a small amount by any means.

jgurewitz's post is probably closer to the expectation. $330k/month is a nice chunk of change, but that's their primary revenue that's expected to mostly go to support the rest of their business operations. They're obviously not going to spend all of it on employees to manage that specific account.
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