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Facebook is destroying my business. What can I do?

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Re: Facebook is destroying my business. What can I do?

#2
Man, this really demonstrates the level to which the "major advertisers" (Google, Facebook, and friends) actually control the internet--the ecosystem is incredible! It also indicates how much it sucks to base your business on someone else's business. I had a friends company end up in a similar spot after Google started crackin' down on farming AdSense links.

The best possible thing you could do would be to find an alternate advertising model. That is, however, likely impossible for you at this point.

All I can say is good luck--interested in seeing what others have to say!

Re: Facebook is destroying my business. What can I do?

#3
This is the first time I have read of an advertiser who saying their business is dependent on fb. Usually it is Google cut us off or lowered us in the results thereby killing our business. Maybe fb should highlight this story next time one of the many fb ROI sucks/fake followers stories comes up.

Re: Facebook is destroying my business. What can I do?

#4
post #3

This is the first time I have read of an advertiser who saying their business is dependent on fb. Usually it is Google cut us off or lowered us in the results thereby killing our business. Maybe fb should highlight this story next time one of the many fb ROI sucks/fake followers stories comes up.

Indeed, I never thought I'd be authoring a post like this, but I really think dating is one area where Facebook holds a monopoly like grip

Re: Facebook is destroying my business. What can I do?

#6
We had this happen a few times with Google. Reading this brings back the feelings I felt at that time; the feeling of being powerless to something 'unfair'. I guess everyone had that one time or another. The reasons why things like this happen are debatable; maybe Google/FB has their reasons to effectively ban companies giving them hundreds of thousands to millions of $ / year (as these guys were and as we were). They are a commercial company and they can decide that and they do decide that. What the infuriating thing is, is the canned response communication. I cannot see that happen in many other business contexts in the world; if you are a $100k or more per year client, it seems totally insane that you get treated like that (actually; I'm not sure it's legal in some countries). The fact you cannot even call someone to just tell you what's up if completely weird. And the reason we will never depend on any 1 company for anything anymore.

This is smart advice always ofcourse, but, for instance, with adwords or adsense, for a long time you really didn't have a choice ; the rest is/was just garbage compared. Adwords has gone downhill a lot and this is good news for Facebook, Bing and others. Adsense still pays most for a lot of niches so a business just depending on ad sales will usually find it hard to diversify.

Now we used adwords for dating as well when Google just removed our ads for various reasons they never told us about (they didn't ban the account, they just told the ads would no longer run) and we did something which i'm not sure will still work but maybe it's worth investigating; we went 'local'; we found sites to advertise on and offline means in all parts of the country and got ads there (cheap) which turned out very effective. Especially on smaller local buy & sell sites / papers etc this returned far more than Google. A lot has changed so i'm not sure if it helps you any, but that's what we did and our profits jumped up with the added bonus that suddenly we had no dependency on Google anymore.

Re: Facebook is destroying my business. What can I do?

#7

There was a post some time ago about a fast food delivery company using porn sites to generate leads. it's certainly not glamorous but you might wanna try that. i'm seeing pretty low CPMs.

Yes, I've seen this post, and we've experimented there too, but we didn't get results on par with what we saw with Facebook. Hard to do targeting there as well beyond locale.

Re: Facebook is destroying my business. What can I do?

#8
post #6

We had this happen a few times with Google. Reading this brings back the feelings I felt at that time; the feeling of being powerless to something 'unfair'. I guess everyone had that one time or another. The reasons why things like this happen are debatable; maybe Google/FB has their reasons to effectively ban companies giving them hundreds of thousands to millions of $ / year (as these guys were and as we were). The…

Thanks, this is good insight and advice. I guess without Facebook our best hope is to think outside the box...So frustrating because we wouldn't have gone into this business had Facebook not been there - we counted on being able to advertise our business on Facebook. After all, we're a legal business, we don't try to pull shady tactics, just trying to build quality apps that people enjoy using. I would have never thought that being prevented from advertising on Facebook would be what will kill us.

Re: Facebook is destroying my business. What can I do?

#9
post #6

We had this happen a few times with Google. Reading this brings back the feelings I felt at that time; the feeling of being powerless to something 'unfair'. I guess everyone had that one time or another. The reasons why things like this happen are debatable; maybe Google/FB has their reasons to effectively ban companies giving them hundreds of thousands to millions of $ / year (as these guys were and as we were). The…

Thanks, this is good insight and advice. I guess without Facebook our best hope is to think outside the box...So frustrating because we wouldn't have gone into this business had Facebook not been there - we counted on being able to advertise our business on Facebook. After all, we're a legal business, we don't try to pull shady tactics, just trying to build quality apps that people enjoy using. I would have never tho…

Try posting ads on Craigslist or Kijiji, that might help too.
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