141–150 of 381 posts
We are just finishing a new iOS app. It will be the first one in our catalog with a "Like us on Facebook" feature. I am skeptical about the value of this feature. Not sure it'll convert at all. Asked a bunch of people who use FB on a daily basis and most told me that they pay zero attention to ads or "likes". Not sure.
One POSSIBLE explanation for what Facebook would use anonymous bots for: verifying the advertisement goes where the advertiser said it would go. Facebook has problems with fraudulent or confusing advertisements. for example, iPad's being advertised for $2, but the user clicking the ad is sent to a penny auction site that bills you $100 when you sign up.... so that domain ends up getting banned, but those advertisers/…
Ad networks tend to be very serious about anything measurable - it's easy to lie and once you've lied about one thing, no matter how small, what else have you lied about and to what magnitude?
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That escalated quickly! And so it seems that Facebook could be proven to be the new groupon. I would absolutely not be suprised if the hits were FB bots - however I'd expect they wouldn't be that directly stupid so as to have an Ad-bot net in house. Surely this is some service they outsource for plausible deniability. Something they would have learned from their relationship handing all user data over to the NSA/CIA.…
So without ANY facts your conclusion is that Facebook is fraudulently deceiving advertisers. And that they are doing this using experience from working with the NSA/CIA in order to cover up the fact that $800 million dollars of Facebook's yearly profits will disappear overnight once people realise the truth. And as such they are willing to pay out the ad-bot companies in order to hide this conspiracy. Right.
What about the farking article? Where they proved that 80% of their clicks were from bots. Then several others confirm they ahve the same experience?
What about those facts?
I also speculated on what FB is doing. Them giving user data to the NSA/CIA - that is a supposed fact, sure, but I am not the only person who believes this.
Am I extremely distrustful of Facebook? Of course! Maybe you have not followed their track record or the character of their founder.
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Here's the MD5 of your ascii version of the screenshot of the blog post just in case: 14e34998a7bc46174bccd981ad5f41f6
I acknowledge receipt of the MD5 of the ASCII of the screenshot of the blog. Please acknowledge receipt of acknowledgement.
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That escalated quickly! And so it seems that Facebook could be proven to be the new groupon. I would absolutely not be suprised if the hits were FB bots - however I'd expect they wouldn't be that directly stupid so as to have an Ad-bot net in house. Surely this is some service they outsource for plausible deniability. Something they would have learned from their relationship handing all user data over to the NSA/CIA.…
We need to see some real numbers before making these kind of predictions. What was the volume of clicks that OP couldn't detect? 10, 1K, 1M? It makes a big difference. Also given FB users' aversion to ads this whole issue could be explained by users just clicking the back button. Ad supported sites have trained users to do three things very well: install adblock, habitually ignore ads, quickly click away from any int…
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While I doubt malicious intent on FB's part there's certainly a financial incentive to ignore this problem. How would their earnings reports change if they stopped charging at least some advertisers for 80% of clicks?
It would be a very, very short term financial incentive. Advertisers monitor to see performance on the other end, and when the campaigns don't yield actual success they move on. The only real exception to this are mega-brands that advertise just to build namespace. Everyone else expects direct action from some hefty percentage of their ads.
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Is it though? It seems they spent a lot of time throwing more and more javascript at the problem until they realized they couldn't figure out what was happening. If they had real logging from the beginning, it would have unconfused them much sooner.
How would you use the access log to determine if client-side javascript was being executed?
Very unlikely to have been bots from FB, they're not yet quite that desperate. They would be 90% sure of getting busted, and it would be a huge deal breaker for a lot of their clients. A suicide move. The more plausible reality is that there are just a lot of bots crawling FB fan pages, poorly programmed bots that will just follow every single link they come across. That's very much in line with my personal experienc…
Much like the multiple account issue, it's beneficial for Facebook to turn a blind eye. That is, unless it escalates into a PR issue.
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It would be a very, very short term financial incentive. Advertisers monitor to see performance on the other end, and when the campaigns don't yield actual success they move on. The only real exception to this are mega-brands that advertise just to build namespace. Everyone else expects direct action from some hefty percentage of their ads.
You act as if "everyone else" sees results from FB ads. They don't. This is a well known problem. They have a high rate of adoption from new sign-ons, and also a high level of departure. While the first number is greater than the second number, they are ok. Either they will manage to improve value and keep more of the advertisers, or one day the Ponzi scheme implodes.
Most ads target a specific outcome: You buy a product, create an account, joining a mailing list, etc. Even the most technically incompetent advertisers establishes these fundamental metrics such that they can say "I spent $1,000,000 on Facebook ads and only got ten signups. I spent $1,000,000 on iAds ads and got ten million signups." That sort of thing.