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

jordan-shared.medium.com

261–270 of 322 posts

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

#261

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…

I run a consulting company and if I decided to stop working for a client the right thing would be to give some explanation even if it's "We don't think your website meets our quality bar". Almost 80% of the ads I see on Facebook are of similar quality. If they're trying to reduce low quality content on their platform, than they should just say that.

From the article, Shared.com and its subbrands already didn't have a relationship with Facebook, they had a relationship with "third-party contractors." They already had stopped working for them.

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

#262
> If given the chance, I would go to great lengths to adjust my business, to right whatever wrong Facebook believes I have committed. I would change my business model, and shift the direction of my business to ensure I am fully compliant with Facebook’s policies. I have done it many times before. I would like to do it again.

15 years ago or so I happened to become a moderator on forum for script kiddies. I had been a temporal appointment for a month, because of another anecdotal funny story, but what I've found while being a moderator, that all those script kiddies trying to sell some stolen data were open for a discussion of their behaviour. In a good way open.

Before me (and by the way after me, and even with me) the forum was a mess. A great heap of kids trying to outcry others with their offers to find a buyer for their crap. There were strictly sounding rules, like "do not post into your forum topic (to get it on top of others) more than once per day", which were violated frequently. The approach of a moderator before me was to temporarily ban anyone he caught crossing the line.

I was the reason of my temporary assignment to this forum, and I tried to do the best I could. So I started to take notes, and I talked to people, explaining them what they did wrong, and what consequences they would face when I'll run out of time to talk with them. It worked like a charm, they were ready to conform to the rules, conditionally on the rules for everyone not just them. I used banning as a way to affect behaviour, but mostly short-term bans, no more than a day long, just to make sure they noticed me and to give them a feeling that they were punished enough and all their guilt is in the past redeemed and forgotten. (The guy before me could kind of dug up some half-a-year old violation and use it as an official reason for ban, while the real reason was violation of a pecking order, with him on the top).

I had learned a lot from that. From the other hand I have been never worked for 12+ hours a day for a month without days off. It was exhausting. If I had some tools for automation it would be easier, but I never got time to write the tools I needed.

I know that Facebook is a lot of orders of magnitude bigger then my problem was, so I'd likely be mistaken if tried to extrapolate, but nevertheless, my guess is Facebook have run out of resources to manage that mess and is trying to shrink it.

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

#263
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obviously a judgment call but I don't think the GP comment was super pejorative. It was fulminating a bit (also against the guidelines), but not so much that we would post a moderation scolding. The issue with the comment I replied to is that it crossed into a personal harangue. That tends to degrade discussion much faster—note how with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25634048 the thread is already headed d…

Who are you dang? Are you an official representative of HN? Because it appears that the vast majority of your comments are nothing but comments about other people's comments, or directives to follow guidelines. Frankly, it seems more positive for the community to vote with their feet on comments and posts vs one individual continuously navigating through posts and threads telling people how to behave. I'm serious abo…

Please don't delete your comment since this is a great reminder for all of us, but yeah, dang is an active HN mod.

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

#264

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…

[deleted]

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

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of advertising, I read "57M" as $57,000. They would normally write 57MM if they meant $57 million, wouldn't they?

Do you mean like the Roman "M" for thousand and "MM" for million? That is mixing Arabic numerals with Roman numerals.

MM to denote millions is reasonably common in some fields: https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ot...

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

#266
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very common content marketing content. These articles are not intended to educate the reader, they're written to get high search rankings, and high click throughs.

So is the business that I buy an ad on Facebook, someone clicks on it, I then show them a bunch of ads, and I get paid enough for those ads to recoup the money I spent on my Facebook ad, and then some? Kind of genius, in a way.

I always wondered who's actually making the money, when so many ads inside free mobile games are for other free mobile games. Someone has to actually buy something at some point!

I wish there was a global tracker for services that make money through ads, that reported the percent of ads that are for other services in the same category. All that data is secret though, probably.

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

#267
Shared.com has the headlines that are extremely simular to the fake add headlines you see. If I was to implement some automation to kick of agressive spammers, it would not be too hard for Shared's content to get mixed into that pile.

Given how much you have to spend on Facebook ads to still generate views. I wont be losing sleep over it.

Maybe its a sign to move on to more productive things.

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

#268
post #37
post #30

> Facebook has systematically shut down our 2 small businesses during a pandemic and economic crisis without explanation. If you've spent $57MM on Facebook ads, are you still considered a "small business"? Perhaps I'm out of touch. I think the warning about building your business on someone else's land still applies but I'm not sure how you get around that when so much of the world's attention is controlled by a few…

> I think the warning about building your business on someone else's land There aren't really any businesses which have sovereign territory

Well, at least not currently. The East India Company didn't worry about building their business on other people's land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_rule_in_India

There are a couple authoritarian states that have fully-owned state enterprises that people might also argue are one-in-the-same.

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