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This Man's $600,000 Facebook Disaster Is A Warning For All Small Businesses
Submitted by Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
It continues to amaze me how people are completely ignoring what appears to be an incredible amount of shadiness inherent in Facebook’s business model. Whether or not this is intentional click fraud, it is clear that advertisers are not getting what they think they are getting. They won’t be fooled forever, and once they wake up to the money being wasted on fake “likes” and “clicks,” I’m curious to see what happens to their revenue.
The following article from SF Gate is a perfect followup to my post from a couple weeks ago: How Much of Facebook’s Ad Revenue is From Click Fraud?
Perhaps the most shocking passage from the entire article is the following:
Naturally, Brar began disputing his bill with Facebook. He wanted his clicks audited by a third party, to see how many were genuine. Then he discovered that Facebook’s terms of service forbid third-party verification of its clicks. That’s something all advertisers should be aware of before they spend a penny on Facebook.
Facebook is different from the rest of the online ad industry, which follows a standard of allowing click audits by third parties like the IAB, the Media Ratings Council or Ernst & Young.
Um, ok then…
Now more from the SF Gate:
Raaj Kapur Brar runs a small but successful empire of online fashion magazines from his base just outside Toronto. Some of his titles are huge online brands, such as Fashion & Style Magazine, which has 1.6 million Facebook fans.
That’s more fans than Elle magazine has.
Recently, however, Brar has fallen out of love with Facebook. He discovered that his Facebook fanbase was becoming polluted with thousands of fake likes from bogus accounts. He can no longer tell the difference between his real fans and the fake ones. Many appear fake because the users have so few friends, are based in developing countries, or have generic profile pictures.
At one point, he had a budget of more than $600,000 for Facebook ad campaigns, he tells us. Now he believes those ads were a waste of time.
Facebook declined multiple requests for comment on this story.
Brar’s take is a cautionary one because Facebook has 25 million small businesses using its platform for one marketing purpose or another. Many of them are not sophisticated advertisers — they are simply plugging a credit card number into the system and hoping for the best. This is what can happen if you don’t pay careful attention to contract language, or the live, real-time results your campaigns on Facebook are having.
Here’s how Brar believes it went down: He became interested in advertising on Facebook in 2012, and he took it seriously. He went to Facebook’s local Toronto office where he was trained to use the advertising interface. They set up the campaign, and ran a small “beta” test. Then, in late October Brar pulled the trigger on a massive push through Facebook’s Ads Manager. He used Bitly and Google Analytics to measure the number of clicks his campaign was generating.
The results were disastrous, Brar says.
Facebook’s analytics said the campaign sent him five times the number of clicks he was seeing arrive on his sites, which Brar was monitoring with Bitly, Google Analytics, and his own web site’s WordPress dashboard. There was a reasonable discrepancy between the Bitly and Google numbers, Brar says, but not the five-fold margin between Google’s and Facebook’s click counts.
At one point, data from Facebook indicated his ads had delivered 606,000 clicks, but the site itself registered only 160,000 incoming clicks from Facebook, according to data supplied by Brar. (160,000 clicks is a not insignificant return. After all, these are not clicks on a mere Facebook page, these are users who clicked through to an off-Facebook site.)
“I don’t know what to say, right? This is a huge loss. This ran for four days, then we just stopped the campaign,” Brar says.
Then, things got worse. Even though Fetopolis wasn’t advertising, the likes and new followers kept on piling up. Normally, an advertiser would be pleased at such a result, but every time Brar checked a sample of the new fans he found people with dubious names; a picture of a flower as a profile shot; and fewer than 10 friends — classic signs of a fake profile.
Naturally, Brar began disputing his bill with Facebook. He wanted his clicks audited by a third party, to see how many were genuine. Then he discovered that Facebook’s terms of service forbid third-party verification of its clicks. That’s something all advertisers should be aware of before they spend a penny on Facebook: Facebook has operated this way for a long time, and has a page for advertisers explaining in more depth why third-party click reporting may not match Facebook’s click counts. Essentially, Facebook suggests, if clicks are not measured in exactly the same way over the same time intervals then there will always be discrepancies.
Facebook is different from the rest of the online ad industry, which follows a standard of allowing click audits by third parties like the IAB, the Media Ratings Council or Ernst & Young.
This will all be exposed by the market sooner or later. I’m just shocked it is taking so long for people to put two and two together.
Full article here.
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Relevant page and facebook?
Bit of a contradiction, if not downright oxymoronic.
dupe
I do the same thing for YouTube videos if its some bunch of ass hats with stocks tips or some other variety of snake oil. If you click and stay connected (in a seperate minimized window) I believe the payment is higher than just for a display.
There was a period recently where every YouTube video had an ad for some kind of game. Game? Balderdash! Ther only game I have on my computer is the SnP. I thought Google was supposed to know that.
Anyone remember the great click fest we had here when a Jim Cramer ad got rotated onto the site? Haven't seen him since.
Facebook's primary source of income has to be the NSA data access sales, not "ad revenues", ad revenues are a beard, they don't break out "police state revenues", those are included in "ad revenues".
A snake oil salesman is someone who knowingly sells fraudulent goods or who is himself or herself a fraud, quack, charlatan, and the like....
Anyone that gets in bed with Suckerberg deserves the teabagging that results.
What a giant P-ness!
Hahahhaha, "Ponziman," that is great, Wm. B.
"Fakebook is a valuable part of our economy and national security. Due to its recent collapse, my new EO will require all Amerikan serfs to acquire Fakebook accounts. Thank you."
farcebook ...
Specializing in imaginary friends since May 18th, 2012...
Can you still "poke" people on the facebook?
Yes, believe it or not. It's great for letting your wife know your intentions... (Among other things)
Well if they like their fake likes and clicks they can keep their fake clicks and likes
isn't facebook "too big to fail"?
a dynamic, real-time, insight-rich database that could be mined, interpreted, and analyzed to study end-user behavior needs, wants, and desires.
that would be so cool for capitalism.
Suckerberg Farce book... Now wonder the kids are leaving in droves. Cloud social is going to have a 2000 style crash over privacy...
The SUKI (tm) RELIGION, The New World Religion (tm) ( brand name religion ) uses word of mouth advertising and referrals to recruit members. Online advertising is minimal, and is usually only done in low or no-cost venues.
How is it you're still here and bob the horse is in his 5th incarnation?
" I am....In a world of shit"
- Private Gomer Pyle
so...I like books but I would never touch FB and have never looked at a FB page...I need to know...does this mean FB pays some one in Duckaduckastan to do the clicks or do they used sofisticated techniques such as routing bots and other 'hiding' methods?
Detective Lieutenant Steve McGarrett: "FaceBook 'em, Danno!"
Anybody who saw The Social Network should know how much of a sketchy fuck Zuckerberg is. He stole the idea from those twins with downs syndrome then he stole his friend's shares. He's the kind of person who would cut you open if he thought you swallowed a penny.
LMAO, you got me interested - will take a look at the movie, thought its crap, but now the plot sounds too promissing
In other words, he's a pretty typical member of the Satanic Tribe! Business as usual with the evil bastards!
So wait. All those hot chicks with semi-naked profile pics who want to be my fartbook friends are actually toothless, dirt poor pakistanis working in a third world click farm!?
I am shocked! SHOCKED!!
Zuck sucks bucks and everybody gets Zucked...
"I’m just shocked it is taking so long for people to put two and two together"
it hasn't it's just that, for now anyway, everyone is making money. when that stops that's when everyone cries FRAUD.
I did an audit of some of my facebook ads a few weeks ago. I found that all of my likes were fake. Facebook did not respond to my request for a refund. Here is my write up: http://seekingalpha.com/p/1l34h
Somehow I cannot imagine Quiana Mzjuicy atkins as being a real person, let alone interested in, or have knowledge of market sarc merchandise. Could be wrong.
However, for $25 what were you hoping for?
You get what you pay for comes to mind. Good luck with refund.
I put in a friend request to pearl. I'll let you know what I find.
ALL YOUR INTERNET POINTS ARE BELONG TO ME!!!
Suckerberg is a doppelgänger of McLovin's character in Kick Ass.
'Yo Sandberg, lean in biotch!'
'Yes Mark my sweet boy, how can I please your mega nerd brain today?'
'Yo here it is Sandy straight from the Z-Man!!! I'm gonna buy me some sweeeeet Whatsapp messenging and shit and steal that ass play from motha fucker Google Brin biiiiiiiiiitch! Then Z-Man is gonna be da king motha fucka!!!!'
''Great idea Mark. We should be adding free txt messaging to our app lineup. You're brilliant my lord child master! How much did that cost you? $100 million? Even $200 million would be worth it for the good buzz and third world women's issues we can promote on there!'
''Biiiiiiiiitch!! That shit cost me $19 billion son!!! You crazy girl!!'
'Ahhhhh Mark, it has no revenue and is completely free? And most of the accounts are fake or owned by poor Africans and Asians who don't buy things. Didn't you realize that?'
''Yo Sandy, shut your mouth girl. The Z-man is now da messaging instant king boss of tha planet!! Bitchez be lovin' the Z-man now son!'
Let FakeBook get to $75 so I can get out before it's exposed as a scam ... thanks!
Get off the Zuckster's case. Cats and Dogs need websites too.
Soooo.... I work as a nightclub DJ as well and I have an "artist" page set up in Facebook to promote that business. I have about 600 genuine likes (I know, not anything in the grand scheme) on this page, people that I have specifically sought after for like of my style of music, people that have found my work and arrived on my page... et cetera
About a month a go I started getting hammered with all sorts of likes from completely random countries. In and of itself this isn't a big issue BUT Facebook selectively drives your page traffic to a limited number of your "liking" fans. Now that I sit at 800 I know only 75% of those are actual people yet my posts only reach about 5% of the TOTAL. Every post I now make is dilluted by all the bots and like farmers.
In short, due to these fake likes it will never be even remotely cost effective for me to market content on my own page or try to link to my work on another site since it will hit a completely bogus market.
One of the competitors to my company put some new products on thier website and within a day they had a few hundred tweets exclaiming about the product and glowing reviews. The problem was that none of the products were available for sale yet. No stores had them. SO how did hundreds of people get the product and review it before it was available. Tweets like, "My son wore your product to practice today, and never performed better."
My company has 275k Facebook likes and we've never advertised. One of our other compteitors ran some Facebook ads and thier likes went from 85k to 450k in two weeks. The president of my company was upset and thought we were getting our asses handed to us. A year later that competitor was out of business after blowing $100 million. Turns out they were just running a scam to go public and cash out. One of those rare times the early investors lost cash, not like $100 million even matters to them.
Oh well, at least zuchinni or whatever the fuck his name is has enough money to last him the rest of his life.
And onto the next wallstreet darling. lol.
Last summer there was a story from a business that cancelled their FB advertising. Basically they looked at the clicks and found a large percentage of them were coming from browsers without javascript or some other modern technology (I forgot the details). Basically they decided there's no way so many real clicks could come from a bunch of 1990's computers and must be fake.
wasnt that Ford or some car company?
the new bill hicks? [nsfw]
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in the linked youtube video are those of the comedian and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of trader1.
Sometimes if I'm pissed at a store I'll stand at the threshold and walk in and out a whole bunch of times setting off the sensor and screwing up their conversions for the day. The door sensor will say an extra twenty or so customers walked in that day but sales will show they didn't buy anything.
It' what you get when corporations grow to huge bureaucratic nightmares. They can't even figure out how to sell anything. All they do is rely on comps and traffic data. When number bullshit can increase your enterprise value, that becomes all they care about.
Fake Facebook likes and fake tweets exist because a company putting out crazy Twitter numbers can see their shares skyrocket in value even if sales aren't really increasing. Essentially advertising channel stuffing. At least 70% of what you see on a store shelf in many retailers will never make it into a consumer's hands. But that revenue was booked by somebody.
Cause I can't post pics. As fools rushed in
http://www.bigbendbikersforfreedom.com/2012/05/free-facebook-stock-take-...
Likes are worth more than gold folks. Start buyin'
Its shady in a frivolous new normal way that anyone would bet 600k without doing any research first. Bet he did the research and decided the quickest way to make money off FarceBook is to sue them. Looking for some quick ROI from the sob jury...
When will Mt Gox start trading 'likes?
I don't have Fb, never had FB and today Dumped Twitter.
Both a wast of time.
Agreed. Fakebook has been pissing me off ever since Zuckerberg began using his money to push for illegal alien amnesty. Because we need 40 million new welfare recepients who will vote Democrat for centuries. Look how well that has worked so far?
(slurp, slurp, slurp)
why yes, barrie, i will prostitute fakebook for your political needs!
(slurp slurp)
Ahhhhhhhh! good job, zuck. here's a tissue.
The Satanic Tribe wants illegals and want to take your guns away that you'd use to defend yourself with from all those criminal illegals!
Chinese sellers with fake feedback in thousands on ebay predate facebook by about a decade.
Advertise on faceplant and get all you deserve, 12" up the ass.
You have no friends.
Fakebook!
Hahahaha, suckers!
(yours,)
---the zucker
We tried a campaign for months spending $1300 per month targeting a specific demographic that was easily measured --- AND VIRTUALLY NOTHING FROM NEARLY 30,000 'CLICKS' And almost all clicks bounced off our home page.
This has click fraud written all over it. We stopped the campaign and have never purchased another one.
Sucker err... I mean ZuckerBerg. What more did you need to know?
It's run by the Satanic Tribe What do you expect from the evil bastards?!?
Raaj Kanpur Brar... chap sounds about as all-Canadian as Grandma Mackenzie's Delicious Old-time Maple Syrup... sure this isn't some scam trying to get a cashable rebate out of Zuckmeister and import a few more homeboys from Jaffna into the land of opportunity and overpriced condos... Canadian online fashion magazines... yeah, right, I got a Nigerian investment opportunity I'd like to discuss with you...
Reggie Middleton had it figured out a while ago. Here is a recent post.
http://boombustblog.com/blog/item/9204-facebook-ad-model-as-scam-part-2
Yeah, Reggie has been on the ball with just about everything since I first found him on Keiser.
Fashion... style... Canadian...
Pick which one of the three words above does not belong in the group...
Winner receives an online voucher for a free trip to Milan via Ouagadougou on Nigerian 419 Airways... fly the friendly skies...
WHY IS THE MSM NOT RUNNING THIS STORY?????
SURELY THEY WOULD LIKE TO SEE FB FAIL SO THEY COULD CLAW BACK THE BILLIONS OF AD SPEND THAT GOES TO THAT SITE?
SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT HERE
13th Tribal protection...
You don't have that?
I get those emails wanting to sign me up to do the "fake likes" all the time and those folks who do them are paid by Fortune 500 companies to do a lot of it...maddening...
Watch the "generation like" PBS special..done very well and see how the movie industry works those likes and strategizes it, and you also might wonder why Facebook is choosing Barclays bank at a partner for start ups too in the UK.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2014/02/generation-like-relentless-market...
I know a guy who made quite a lot of money doing business online , mainly trading in domain names. He told me that he would start up a new retail business selling a certain kind of widget.
He is current on all the various schemes. I noticed on his new company Facebook he just launched it and he was getting 500 likes per hour. No way it was real. Then I think it stopped around 30k likes.
There must be some cheap agency in New Delhi offering it.
Dear,
Serial Junkers.
-
yours truly,
Roy.
FB likes are as fake as YouTube views with that joker Psy's Gangnam Style clip getting 400 million plus views, South Korean bots blowing smoke out of the back of 80,000 junkyard Dell PCs in Dhaka back-alley internet cafes as some Tamil ladyboy tries to set up a fake Filipina dating site...
As a small time advertiser on Facebook, let me tell you they treat their advertisers like sh!t. We're simply the ones who pay their bills.
If you have a question or problem, you leave a message on a public forum. They might answer you in two weeks if they feel like it.
Often when they do reply, they give you some boilerplate nonsense with a link to their inscrutible directions that don't address the questions asked. By then it's hard to recall what your question was.
Also if you're testing multiple ads, you have no sayso as to the percentage of ads you want to run for each one. Invariably they will run a 1,000 impressions of the ad you want fewer impressions of while running 20 of the ad you really want to test.
My impression is that they've got a bunch of young millionaires running the advertising department who have no clue about advertsing or marketing. They think they are smart because they own a million dollars in stock, but they don't know jack about advertising.
Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd.
Hucksters creating a false crowd is as old as they come.
I did the exact test 4 years ago and quickly determined that fakebook advertising was a click scam. I was able to trace back clicks to known click farms in Bangalore. Fuckerberg and fakebook are a huge Fucken scam.
Ha ha - even Death has an opinion on Facebook!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXWXjUIMLQc
I had advitertised on FB once, at the beginning. Spent $25 to learn the lesson. I had 10-20 clicks from single accounts with intervals of 5-10 seconds eating my $25 within few days, for which FB billed me. I raised the complaint, they shrugged it off. I have stopped advertising.
I want to see naked boobs...
Facebooked.. That's why I hate Jews
My business page has 300 likes and I have shaken 80% of their hands and the other 20% we shook virtually. Thanks for sharing this. I have been shaking my head for years at FBs platform and lack of transparency.
facecrook
Time to short this steaming pile of dung.
Recall how they SUDDENLY like overnight solved the mobile ad problem? Just like that and wooosh - people started clicking ads on smartphones.
FUCK OFF - NOBODY CLICKS A FUCKING AD ON A SMARTPHONE.
IF IT SOUNDS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE - IT IS A SCAM
Wow! I've been using Facebook for months.
I had no idea they had adverts.
<-- He paid FB $600K? HA HA! [/nelson]
<-- 15 billion active FB accounts can't be wrong.
Mark Zuckerberg is a human-impersonating alien from another planet who has come to earth to enslave mankind. He has nearly succeeded with his evil Matrix-inspired plan...
Fuck Facebook. Not just for it's unscrupulous business practices, but also because of the way it has largely dominated communication. Personally, I'm not a fan of having a proprietary algorithm choose who sees what I write.
These FB users are surprised?
"They" = FB users
For years, I've been referring to it as Farcebook
Where are the lawyers? Looks juicy.
Still got a Whatsapp account? Delete it NOW. Use Telegram or the supersecure Threema (Swiss product, servers in Switzerland only).