Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

Compare it to google's problem filtering out automatically generated splogs, though - it took them years to make progress against that.

Real human social activity is a lot more random than real informational content in blogs - so fb's problem seems harder.

Also, facebook banning accounts is a much stronger action than google just lowering the pagerank of suspected splogs.

So overall I think fb's problem is harder than a currently google-unsolved problem.

Pardon my naivety, but why would a third party want to set bots onto Facebook ads? I guess one could hope to exhaust a competitor's marketing budget, but surely this isn't an established tactic.

Even more Machiavellian would be Google doing it to discredit Facebook's entry into the advertising business. I doubt this because they've got too much to lose - if they were discovered, it would seriously hurt their "don't be evil" reputation, which is worth billions to them. And just imagine the anti-trust suit...

Although Facebook stands to gain the most from this, my argument about reputation damage applies there too. So who is paying for the bots?

It sounds like you don't need to go to that much hassle currently, but even that rigmarole is simple enough to combat. The user account should be real, the usage real (comments, photos, messages back and forth) and the friends also real. False positive spam Ids are OK, that will lower your revenue but won't constitute fraud with your customers. Put up a test for uses you think are spamming, the test they already do of identifying photos of your friends would be a good one.

Large numbers of real looking fake accounts should be hard to keep up.

Quite interesting top comment on Reddit thread http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/xel55/startup_cl...

"I can confirm this. I used Facebook to advertise my page and went from ~2000 fans to over 6000 within several months. Awesome, right? Wrong. I thought it was weird that the new fans would never, EVER interact with the pages. So I started stalking their profiles. Guess what? Bots/hijacked accounts/fake accounts. How do I know? Many of them have NO friends. Then I noticed something really scary...repeats. Actual pictures showing up more than once for new likes. Very, very few of the accounts were from the USA. I started casually messaging the accounts that looked suspicious. Not a single one with no friends responded. Out the ones that looked legitimate (although with a list of likes that is in the thousands), only a handful replied, and 100% of those people confirmed they found my page through affiliated sites, and not through Facebook itself. I ended the ad program recently and the bots stopped. tl;dr: Do not, under any circumstance, advertise with Facebook. They will feed you fake likes. If you want fake likes, use a site like fiverr to generate them, it's way cheaper and yields identical results."

Because they would not make a tenth of the money they do if they did that, obviously.

Most sales or acquisitions originated online are based on rational decisions, not on the appeal of annoying ads.

The day advertisers start to use a verifiable CPA system, 80% of online advertising cease to exist and 95% of today's start-ups see their cash vaporize.