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Facebook Fraud [video]

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Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#181

Post by mullingitover »

Loughla wrote: post #165
mullingitover wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have two questions to respond to this - how did people do all of these things before the facebook platform? What is stopping you from doing these same things? 1) They used other services (e.g. Evite) which had the same effect 2) Nobody uses those other services anymore (okay, I got one evite from the one friend who refused to use facebook...and then somebody created the event page on facebook and all the party pl…

I feel like that is a false choice. The only options are to either not do anything and be 'butthurt' or use facebook? What about relationships with people? What about carrier pigeons? What about personal servants? All of those things are able to do what you're complaining about, they just take slightly more effort. I guess it's to each his own - is your support of a terrible, invasive company more important than your…

Eh, Facebook isn't that terrible. I'm not saying I think they're good, but they make what is currently the modern equivalent of the telephone. It is what it is.

And it's not about my convenience, it's about not inconveniencing my friends by demanding that they remember that I'm a special snowflake who won't use the dominant communication platform of the day, and I must have my special needs attended to by using older, more inconvenient channels each time they want to send out a mass party invite.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#182

Post by tonydiv »

mandlar wrote: post #143
tonydiv wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have completely hidden my news feed. Since I consider FB only to be valuable as a utility, i.e. a means of communication or a repository of information such as where someone lives, the newsfeed is a complete waste of time and useless. My solution is to use custom CSS to hide the newsfeed, but keep everything else. As a result, I spent 1/10th the time on Facebook, and only use it when I need to get information from…

I really like this idea. I think I'll give it a go. Thanks for sharing it!

You're welcome! Let me know how it works for you in the Medium comments.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#183

Post by prostoalex »

Loughla wrote: post #138
baby wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish I could do that. I used to ask a friend to change my password, now I use www.offsocialnetwork.com to do it (I'm doing it this week). But I can't go really long without facebook since all is planned from there, the parties, the social events, the foreign friends visiting my city, foreign friends keeping in touch with me... I guess it's easier not to have facebook when you didn't travel a lot and don't ha…

"But I can't go really long without facebook since all is planned from there, the parties, the social events, the foreign friends visiting my city, foreign friends keeping in touch with me..." I have two questions to respond to this - how did people do all of these things before the facebook platform? What is stopping you from doing these same things? I find it fascinating that people treat websites like facebook lik…

> I have two questions to respond to this - how did people do all of these things before the facebook platform? What is stopping you from doing these same things?

Some of "these things" did not exist before. Like yesterday a former coworker of mine posted a bunch of pictures of her kids growing up, it was interesting and reminded me how the time flies.

Would I ask around acquaintances for her phone number, then get on the phone and ask her to send me a printed photo album of her children? Yeah, that seems non-creepy at all.

Friend of my spouse checked in at a restaurant that's opened just recently, I saw my wife liking it, and asked about opinion of the food. Would the "before" solution include compiling a list of my + my spouse's friends with their respective phone numbers, then calling everybody inquiring which restaurants they recently visited?

Passive information discovery sucked before.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#184

Post by tonydiv »

kostko wrote: post #173
tonydiv wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have completely hidden my news feed. Since I consider FB only to be valuable as a utility, i.e. a means of communication or a repository of information such as where someone lives, the newsfeed is a complete waste of time and useless. My solution is to use custom CSS to hide the newsfeed, but keep everything else. As a result, I spent 1/10th the time on Facebook, and only use it when I need to get information from…

I did something similar on Youtube, I've hidden all the side videos to help me focus on the video I was watching. But on FB, I unfollowed 99% of the people, and only left things like 'March Against Monsanto', and 'Naturalnews', so so my feed only contains stuff that matters to me.

How long did it take you to unfollow everyone on FB? Sounds like that would take a while for someone with 1800 friends.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#185

Post by couradical »

xxbondsxx wrote: post #179
notlisted wrote: post #26

Nice video. All true. I have performed tests with the same ad budget ($20k) and target audience for Google and FB. FB ROI was negative. Google ROI was 400% (travel space). The only thing that seemingly "works" has been buying likes by advertising. This video should help educate my clients of the utter uselessness of those too. This brings up the interesting question of the general (non)value of a lot of mobile advert…

Hey everyone -- sorry to hijack the top thread but I’m an ads engineer at Facebook so I feel qualified to respond. I posted this over on reddit too but it's still pending approval. In the case of this ad — I think we actually delivered on what was asked for. The targeting specs were fairly broad (cat lovers in four countries). Getting 39 people who like cats to like a page with a cute cat picture in 20 minutes sounds…

Watching the video, I don't think that the takeaway was that the advertising was fraudulently performed, but that due to the chaining of likes/engagement/content display, that fake profiles/click farms can have a negative impact on longer-term relationships with people who consume an advertisers content.

I mean, if you look at the page he was trying to drive traffic to, it seems as though 20 minutes would actually be problematic. He was attempting to stretch out the time it took, and failed. If I put up an ad with the basic premise of:"like this page, and it'll download malware" and got likes, the likes would be EXTREMELY suspect, which is what it appeared he was trying to do. I think that non-genuine eyeballs are a large problem for any CPM advertising company, but as this seems tied to how content is distributed after the fact, the problem may be exacerbated.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#186

Post by prostoalex »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #144
mschaecher wrote: post #54

As someone who has helped massively grow a handful of businesses with Facebook being a significant channel, part of me wants to say "Yep, FB advertising is bunk. Everyone stop!" But in reality I'd be saying that in a weak attempt to make my own Facebook advertising more effective. Lemme tl;dr this in three bullets: - It's far easier for non-sophisticated advertisers to waste money. - The ad platform is pretty technic…

This article (video) is pointing to fundamental flaws in FB's advertising offerings. I don't think that any amount of "social media marketing" expertise will compensate for the fact that a large proportion of the ad spend on those offerings may likely be wasted on what is effectively fraud. Even if you optimize for better performance, there will still be inordinate waste to fraud. Beyond that, I think a lot of people…

It's not that fundamental.

Buying Facebook likes for a Facebook page is a subset of ads. You're definitely driven towards it in Facebook UI, but if you're Amazon or NetFlix or Expedia or whoever buys billions of ads nowadays, you still buy clicks to your site and bid on CPC basis.

Anecdotal evidence (visiting facebook.com on the Web, seeing 7 ads on the right-hand side) suggests very few businesses actually pay for likes on pages. My current advertisers are tdameritrade.com, amazon.com, fijiairways.com, digitalsherpa.com, getdrip.com, att.com, tahoeaccommodations.com, none of them having a Like button underneath the ad.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#187

Post by NolF »

quadrangle wrote: post #22

The ad-based revenue model is fundamentally broken. Everyone needs to run Adblock and we need to figure out an economy that doesn't rely on this garbage.

I whitelist some websites from Adblock including Google. The ads need to add value to my browsing experience. Most sites just bombard me with irrelevant ads that distract me from what I'm doing but don't give me any value in return. I often click on ads in Google when I'm searching for a particular product to suit my needs.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#188

Post by theli0nheart »

xxbondsxx wrote: post #179
notlisted wrote: post #26

Nice video. All true. I have performed tests with the same ad budget ($20k) and target audience for Google and FB. FB ROI was negative. Google ROI was 400% (travel space). The only thing that seemingly "works" has been buying likes by advertising. This video should help educate my clients of the utter uselessness of those too. This brings up the interesting question of the general (non)value of a lot of mobile advert…

Hey everyone -- sorry to hijack the top thread but I’m an ads engineer at Facebook so I feel qualified to respond. I posted this over on reddit too but it's still pending approval. In the case of this ad — I think we actually delivered on what was asked for. The targeting specs were fairly broad (cat lovers in four countries). Getting 39 people who like cats to like a page with a cute cat picture in 20 minutes sounds…

It's not just paid likes that people are worrying about--it's organic likes too...which brings me to my question. What is your response to the other problem the OP references: spammers liking thousands of unrelated pages to confuse your algorithms, which in turn diminishes audience reach across the entire network?

I guess I just don't understand why the responsibility is on the advertiser to "target the right people." And really, that's not the problem here. If I had a Page that I wanted to target in Bangladesh, how exactly could I go about doing that without having the majority of my likes be fake?

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#189

Post by JetSpiegel »

xxbondsxx wrote: post #179
notlisted wrote: post #26

Nice video. All true. I have performed tests with the same ad budget ($20k) and target audience for Google and FB. FB ROI was negative. Google ROI was 400% (travel space). The only thing that seemingly "works" has been buying likes by advertising. This video should help educate my clients of the utter uselessness of those too. This brings up the interesting question of the general (non)value of a lot of mobile advert…

Hey everyone -- sorry to hijack the top thread but I’m an ads engineer at Facebook so I feel qualified to respond. I posted this over on reddit too but it's still pending approval. In the case of this ad — I think we actually delivered on what was asked for. The targeting specs were fairly broad (cat lovers in four countries). Getting 39 people who like cats to like a page with a cute cat picture in 20 minutes sounds…

Oh lord, "ads engineer".

I weep for humanity.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#190

Post by loganu »

sytelus wrote: post #170

Why everybody seem to ruling out the idea that FB is not running click farms? Theory that professional likers are clicking Virtual Cats and Virtual Bagles just so they don't get noticed by FB policing seems ridiculous.

I'm not sure. Maybe Facebook knows the blowback from advertisers would be severe and probably grounds for giant lawsuits / fraud cases. Could they outsource or fund clickfarms while still having plausible deniability? Probably. Could they cap people at 300 likes to give more real value to "likes?" Or punish accounts that are 1000% more active and clicky than regular users? Sure, but it hurts their short-term ad revenue. (And might even save the company.)
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