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How Facebook’s Oracular Algorithm Determines the Fates of Startups

nytimes.com

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Re: How Facebook’s Oracular Algorithm Determines the Fates of Startups

#41

Post by walshemj »

ben_jones wrote: post #13
lithos wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There already is looking at Russian ad campaigns during the election. and youtube junk videos shown here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637504 SEO is pretty much the same thing in my opinion.

50% of SEO is convincing non-technical users that they need to pay more for SEO. I imagine this'll be much of the same.

no 90% is persuading businesses that the marketing directors the site the pen friend hi son built Is not fit for purpose.

Its even worse in big traditional firms took me 3 years at a major publisher to get a simple dns redirect done

Re: How Facebook’s Oracular Algorithm Determines the Fates of Startups

#42

Post by daveid »

About a year ago I wrote an essay with this idea [1]. You really don't want your company to be at the behest of facebook/twitter, they can pull the plug on you, change their algorithms, change their rules, force you to pay up, since they control the audience. This is why a platform like Mastodon [2] is attractive (or should be attractive!) to businesses. If you host your own instance of Mastodon, you have full control over your own megaphone.

And that's just the basic principle. Given that Mastodon does not attempt to mess with people's feeds using clever algorithms, instead accepting that when people follow someone they want to see those posts in chronological order, it should be even more attractive to companies used to facebook hiding their posts from their own fans unless they pay up.

[1]: https://medium.com/@Gargron/two-reasons-why-organizations-sh... [2]: https://joinmastodon.org/

Re: How Facebook’s Oracular Algorithm Determines the Fates of Startups

#45

Post by AndrewKemendo »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #35
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #2

I think most people overlook the intelligence value that GAFAM + Tencent have over nearly every other company on the planet. I don't know of any company out there that doesn't use one or more services from these companies which means you're giving them business intelligence about your activities even if you never talk with one of their BD/CD people. And make no mistake that business intelligence is absolutely one of…

I'm honestly surprised that these companies haven't started extracting business intelligence information from their data flows and using it to make investment decisions in public companies. Surely there's a correlation between how often people search for "JC Penny" and JC Penny's earnings. And these companies have far more data than that, alongside a giant pile of money that they can use to fund an investment arm.

Unfortunately it's illegal to do so because it's trading on non-public information. Sergey suggested it long ago but Eric killed it immediately.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1789358

Re: How Facebook’s Oracular Algorithm Determines the Fates of Startups

#46

Post by nihonde »

akanet wrote: post #39
nihonde wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will answer your question with another: what metric are you using to measure ROI? Edit: When you say you know lots of "marketers and advertisers" that are making money from ads, are you referring to resellers and providers of ad inventory and/or analytics, or are you referring to people who actually sell goods and services other than marketing and advertising inventory?

Yeah, this is a very strange statement. Many businesses are printing money advertising through Facebook.

Then you should be able to answer my question: what is the metric for ROI?

Re: How Facebook’s Oracular Algorithm Determines the Fates of Startups

#47

Post by nihonde »

matsur wrote: post #37
nihonde wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will answer your question with another: what metric are you using to measure ROI? Edit: When you say you know lots of "marketers and advertisers" that are making money from ads, are you referring to resellers and providers of ad inventory and/or analytics, or are you referring to people who actually sell goods and services other than marketing and advertising inventory?

People entering and converting through a purchase funnel?

OK, so how is the success of that funnel measured vis-a-vis other promotional channels? And are you able to demonstrate definitively that a visitor from FB concluded a sale? If so, how?

Re: How Facebook’s Oracular Algorithm Determines the Fates of Startups

#48

Post by brianpgordon »

ballenf wrote: post #27
adambyrtek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work on real-time ad auctions is definitely technically challenging, but I'm not convinced about the fun part, and I definitely wouldn't describe that as rewarding (unless you mean that in a purely financial sense).

I was thinking in terms of having the results be immediately measured and quantified. It's kind of a luxury to have such a quick feedback loop. That's all I meant by rewarding, wasn't thinking in financial terms even though that now seems like a more obvious implication.

Given the number of levers they have available to adjust in terms of tuning factors to maximize engagement, and given the changes constantly going out to their platform, and given the changing landscape of the ad market itself over time, I doubt that it's exactly clear to a developer what they're doing right and wrong. Facebook probably has a full-time staff of data scientists to extract conclusions out of that pile of analytics data.

Re: How Facebook’s Oracular Algorithm Determines the Fates of Startups

#49

Post by JoshMnem »

flashman wrote: post #21
denzil_correa wrote: post #18

> And Facebook has even been taking steps to influence offline sales, in order to bring traditional retailers into its orbit. In September, the social network introduced a tool that lets businesses with physical stores show ads to shoppers and their Lookalikes even if they visit the store but don’t buy anything. Does anyone know how this works?

"Facebook will also now know you visited a store based on a new feature that matches GPS, beacons, WiFi, radio signals, and cell towers with brick-and-mortar coordinates." [1] Basically harvesting data from your phone's sensors, where their app is installed. And: "A new Facebook API, called the Offline Conversions API, works with a number of in-store sales systems from companies like Square and IBM to match their cus…

That's terrible. I hope that removing all of Facebook's software from a phone and using cash prevents that. I hope you're joking about the audio signal.

Re: How Facebook’s Oracular Algorithm Determines the Fates of Startups

#50

Post by csallen »

nihonde wrote: post #46
akanet wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is a very strange statement. Many businesses are printing money advertising through Facebook.

Then you should be able to answer my question: what is the metric for ROI?

Metric for ROI is profit from a customer vs cost to acquire that customer via Facebook ads.
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