31–40 of 43 posts
My take-away is that facebook has mostly vacuumed up MySpace traffic (which was conveniently omitted from the chart).
Yes, people spend a lot of time on FB but how much of it converts to revenue? Google could be converting visitors to revenue faster than what FB could be. Say, I search for a .is domain registrar, I click on the ad which seems to be selling it the cheapest and I leave Google. My short visit was converted to revenue and converted quick. On the other hand, I go to FB not to look for anything specific but only checkout…
The graph that would be more interesting is a graph of ad sales. Google and Facebook are both fighting for the same marketing budget dollars.
The comments here and the comments at allthingsD make it clear that many people don't understand how cookies and data collection work which is surprising. Every time you visit a page with any kind of facebook integration (like button or whatever) facebook adds your online behaviour to it's user profile. Ideally, from facebooks perspective, everyone would always be logged in to facebook and all pages would have a like…
The comments here and the comments at allthingsD make it clear that many people don't understand how cookies and data collection work which is surprising. Every time you visit a page with any kind of facebook integration (like button or whatever) facebook adds your online behaviour to it's user profile. Ideally, from facebooks perspective, everyone would always be logged in to facebook and all pages would have a like…
Does Facebook's privacy statement state that they don't track "logged out" users? Logging out of Facebook does not delete all facebook.com cookies (let alone any web beacons from covert domains Facebook might use), so they could technically still track users. I just deleted my facebook.com cookies. Visiting facebook.com login page issued me 5 cookies. Logging in issued 31 (!) additional cookies. Logging out and resta…
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=186325668085084
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-denies-cookie-tr...
I like how it's "denies allegations". Stay classy, zdnet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse, here, but would you please clarify where the money is, there?
Theoretically, fine-grained targeted advertising is the money. To get to that fine grain, you need lots of Stasi-like data. That's the tough part, unless you're FB. The other half (algorithms) can be continually iterated and improved by throwing math/CS/physics PhDs at the problem.
Actually, on second thought, that's a bit horrifying.
Another thought, FB has become my IM... I spend a majority of time on there chatting, not clicking from page to page so FB's display ad's would be mush less effective to users like myself because the time I spend using there platform to IM is irrelevant/less valuable in relation to google sites.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does Facebook's privacy statement state that they don't track "logged out" users? Logging out of Facebook does not delete all facebook.com cookies (let alone any web beacons from covert domains Facebook might use), so they could technically still track users. I just deleted my facebook.com cookies. Visiting facebook.com login page issued me 5 cookies. Logging in issued 31 (!) additional cookies. Logging out and resta…
:( This meme has been refuted so many times I don't know what else to do. We do not track logged-out behavior. The datr cookie is for phishing and spam protection. http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=186325668085084 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-denies-cookie-tr... I like how it's "denies allegations". Stay classy, zdnet.
And personally, from my corporate experience there's a good chance that you're simply lying to us here and a better chance that you're telling us what you think the truth is but have been lied to yourself.
For instance, the FAQ directly contradicts the Wall Street Journal. You and the FAQ say no logged out info is collected, the article says exactly otherwise.
> WSJ: Facebook acknowledges that it gets that data [from logged out users] but says it deletes it right away.
Oh, I see. You do track them. But, you don't inhale...
Even if we believed you, by collecting that data you change the game entirely. Now you can be legally required to log data from a specific user which you couldn't if the system wasn't in place.
Stay shifty, Facebook.
The comments here and the comments at allthingsD make it clear that many people don't understand how cookies and data collection work which is surprising. Every time you visit a page with any kind of facebook integration (like button or whatever) facebook adds your online behaviour to it's user profile. Ideally, from facebooks perspective, everyone would always be logged in to facebook and all pages would have a like…
Strange - you insert an apostrophe and thus write "it is user profile" but leave it out of "facebook's perspective" where is needed. I can't work out why apostrophic abuse is so popular.
I normally catch them when I read back the comment and think "glad I caught that, I would have looked stupid" ... not this time apparently.
The comments here and the comments at allthingsD make it clear that many people don't understand how cookies and data collection work which is surprising. Every time you visit a page with any kind of facebook integration (like button or whatever) facebook adds your online behaviour to it's user profile. Ideally, from facebooks perspective, everyone would always be logged in to facebook and all pages would have a like…
I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse, here, but would you please clarify where the money is, there?
They also provide a lot of tools to view and examine the data to the advertisers so they can tailor their ads in some way. Most of the times you click one of these ads your user_id or email is sent to the advertisers and they can make pretty good use of that data as well.
That's the obvious one but they also sell the data to market research companies who analyse it and package it up for resale as "customer engagement profiles" or some other euphemism for poorly anonymized user tracking data.
I have no experience with Facebook here but with Google and Yahoo there is an understanding between big advertisers and their account reps about API abuse. Someone's personal credit card rents a few VPS's and some perl scripts start pulling in everything they can and even if they go over the API limits by a few orders of magnitude they never get blocked.
For any ad network or other service provider who has a resource like an ad unit or a like or +1 button everywhere on the web and can track people, the user tracking data is a major revenue stream, both for internal use and external.