I think many of us have the whole 'blackhat SEO' topic on our minds given that there's a thread about it on the front page right now. That said, popularity ranking algorithms often heavily weight votes early in their life cycle, so this kind of behavior isn't necessarily suspicious.
It's an article that, based on the title, is clearly negative about a large tech company. No need to assume any kind of foul play, that kind of title is like catnip to a significant proportion of the HN readership.
It’s not often that you come across an article that seems designed purely to engender schadenfreude, but this fits the bill nicely.
In a slightly more serious tone, the interviewee pulls out the old “won’t someone think of the small businesses?” line at the end. Is there any evidence that this is true? Is is primarily small businesses that are hurt with this kind of instability?
Exactly, a segment of social media users don't mind or are largely apathetic to the advertising/data collection because it keeps the platforms free--that's all that matters to them.
The advertisers are effectively the customer, with the social media platform acting as a vehicle to reach the willing end-user.
With this model, a polished & efficient dashboard/UI for advertiser engagement is as important (if not more important) than the front-end experience that provides end-user engagement.
I am sympathetic to the free-but-ad-supported model. This is how we get Reddit, Stackoverflow, and Google Maps which is a fucking global map and GPS with much better navigation quality than any of its predecessors and it costs exactly $0 to the end user.
It might be the case that there is simply not enough subscription revenue in the world to fund such an operation without advertising. People forget just how much objectively good and useful stuff we have access to because of ad-supported $0 products. Hell, you could argue that Tensorflow and PyTorch themselves are ad-supported products.
The sticking point is that your old ad-supported classifieds paper and network news channels weren't surveilling you across the Web.
And as much as I think we need strict data privacy laws, it's hard to ignore the fact that Facebook ads used to be for penis pills and karate scams, but now for the most part are things that I (or at least my demographic) might want to buy.
This is simply not true in my experience. Most prominent example is Youtube, where there is an option for an ad-free experience which is decently priced. And yet, the adoption is very low and you still see people complaining about ads on Youtube all the time.
I guess a vast majority of people simply don't want to pay if there is a somewhat acceptable free alternative.
I'm paying for many "freely available" services, like RSS readers, email service, and more. I pay to not be the product.
The reason I do not pay for YouTube is that despite paying, I'm still the product - Google is still collecting every bit of data about me, to spam me on their other channels. Instead, I use YouTube (and every other Google product) logged-out, deleting cookies often[0]. I can't do that if I pay for YouTube.
[0] I used to reject cookies, but Google has become unusable that way -- everything goes back to defaults which are exceptionally bad for me.
> Most prominent example is Youtube, where there is an option for an ad-free experience which is decently priced. And yet, the adoption is very low and you still see people complaining about ads on Youtube all the time.
For me, this is similar to why I won't pay for the New York Times subscription, either. I mainly only do stuff on both sites when I find a link to their site. I don't go to their site to do stuff on my own. Why would I subscribe to a site that I don't go to on my own? I do subscribe to ArsTechnica, for example, because I go there frequently.
Furthermore, I might not mind ads, but the ads on YouTube are very obnoxious. There's no intelligence, so you get weird situations like watching a 2 minute ad before being able to watch a 30 second video. Or ads cutting off the speaker mid word. Who thinks that's a good experience? If they can't get that stuff right, why would I pay them?
And on top of that, I find YouTube's "Hey did you know you can pay us money now?!?!?!" pop-ups all over the page to be obnoxious enough that I have decided I will never pay them any money.
Were I a regular visitor who wasn't so off-put by their ham-fisted advertising, I might have considered it, but now they've made going to their site so unpleasant I just avoid it if I can, or hold my nose for a few minutes when watching something with ads. Then I get away from their site as quickly as possible.
Many users felt locked in to FB / like it was a vital part of their life for quite a while before it became an advertising platform. It's only attractive to advertisers if it's a good product for users. They pioneered the business model of selling users out, and in general users think that's gross.
Some of the article could have used another read-through: "...made it more difficult for buyers to roll out new campaigns easily". If it's now more difficult to do it easily, how is it in the end?
I couldn't read the article, on the monitor of the ancient workstation I am using, the article is impossible to read, seemly they assumed everyone by now would have 1080p monitors or something, the site has a giant fixed menubar on the top, and a even bigger "subscribe me" bar on the bottom, and these almost touch on my screen, leaving like 3 lines of readable text on the middle... It is just silly.
EDIT: for a while this reached 10 points, now it is at 2... makes me wonder, what I wrote so horribly wrong that deserves all these downvotes?
On the mobile site the subscribe thingy that covers most of the screen can be closed by tapping the x in the corner of it. Was this not the case on your desktop?
In the old Firefox for Android you could, but sadly the ability to install any extension in the modern Firefox release is locked behind nightly features[1]. It's possible, though. although the API hasn't been implemented completely yet.
Turning it on by default would break a lot of sites because they pop open one of those illegal cookie popups and disable scrolling until you've gone through it. If you can't see the window, all you get is a broken page with no explanation what went wrong.
The addon is open source[2] so if you'd like the feature nonetheless, you should be able to do it with only a few lines of code.
I'm going to have to send your post to our QA person who keeps complaining that stuff I make doesn't exactly match the design, which design was made for her Apple iMac 27, and is unable to understand that basically she is making the design version of a developer saying "but it runs on my machine".
1) Try uMatrix. It blocks third-party JavaScript by default, which is what's used to power a lot of these elements. I don't see the big "subscribe me" bar at the bottom, so I assume uMatrix is preventing the JavaScript that creates it from loading. This will also help with performance on your "ancient workstation".
2) Reader mode seems to eliminate all of this cruft and give you just the meat of the article to read.
It's ironic, but sites with terrible design complaining about other sites with terrible design - HN rules say you can't call out their hypocrisy anymore :)
Facebook has the worst platform in the world. It's normal to get 6 support reps in a row ask you the same identical question you've already answered 5 times in a single thread they can scroll up to read. Each time you reply, a new rep is assigned the ticket, and they want to maximize throughput so they just use a canned response instead of dealing with the issue. But this is normal. They also ban you by default, assuming, I think, that people who aren't legit won't appeal, so legitimate merchants need to appeal to bans multiples times just to begin buying ads. They also restrict your account so you can't do anything, but they leave the ads running and keep billing you. This bankrupts people who can't pause their unprofitable campaigns. My business partner was being billed ten grand daily via a banned/restricted account for weeks on end.
But this is the game. I've spent millions of dollars on G/FB/etc and that's just how it goes.
Yes it is real but he/we were profiting handsomely off the restricted account's spend so we weren't complaining. Not that there is anyone to complain to.
> Each time you reply, a new rep is assigned the ticket
This is insane.
> They also restrict your account so you can't do anything, but they leave the ads running and keep billing you. This bankrupts people who can't pause their unprofitable campaigns.
And almost certainly illegal. If you refused to pay you would probably prevail in a lawsuit, and you might even have a case for extortion or fraud. (IANAL)
There are a ton to criticize about google's adplatform (from user data handling to transparency to semi-monopoly to ...) but at the end of day if I make a proper well targeted campaign I get matching results.
Not all of them and there are some obvious false in there (ergo the need for transparency), but for every company who I have personnaly done the adwords campaign, as long as I disable the display network and make sure the campaign is well made, I get my bang for the buck.
On the other hand I'm still not sure why anyone who isn't scam or retargeting advertises on facebook, its "leads" are absolutely terrible in quality. I'm the kind who is willing to spend lots of time and a/b testing on my campaign (since at the end of the day it's the source of my money), but no matter what I do it costs me between 3 and 20 times more on facebook than on google to get the same number of end game sales.
It's a terrible ad network. When I dabbled in adult toys sales a while back I had to deal with adult networks ads and even THEY were better. Honestly it's impressive to me how bad it is.
(ads are purely textual and non retargeted, real products or services with great reviews)
The traffic quality is amazing. Your results may vary. We all put up with FB's BS because their traffic is gold. Yes the lead gen feature isnt great but if you can't profit from FB traffic you are doing something wrong.
I'm not saying I can't profit, didn't say that at all.
I'm saying if I have a buck to put, it's worth several times more on adwords than on fb.
If you are traffic starved then sure fb could be usefull but I suspect the vast majority of small/medium business runs out of ad budget before they run out of adwords growth capabilities, and they value qualified leads much more than raw traffic.
Again OF COURSE it varies by business and I'm sure other people have the opposite experience, but mine has been clear cut and I shared it.
You shared it without enough nuance, and that turned it into misleading information for most people out there. The fact that you wrote a lengthy piece and gave yourself a lot of credit as a marketer only further exacerbated the negative learnings for anyone who read your first piece. I am glad you received an immediate rebuttal, which leads me to hope that not too many young entrepreneurs were led to turn their back on what's arguably one of the most important marketing channels, and for many companies the only viable one.
I disagree with your point but I want to answer one part in particular:
> gave yourself a lot of credit as a marketer
I in no way intended to do that. If I did, I apologize. I may be bad, or good, or decent, or terrible at it, I don't know. The point I was trying to make on that part of my original comment was simply: I do spend time on my campaign and A/B test difference, not as-in "I'm great", but as-in "I didn' just make my first campaign there in 5 minutes without trying to improve it or learn from my mistakes" because I think anecdotal evidences given from that point of view have no value at all.
So again, sorry if that is indeed what can be understood in what I wrote because that would be egoistical and wrong, but I genuinely don't believe that's what I wrote.
I absolutely did not have the same reaction you had to their post. The very first sentence could be read as a broad brush statement, but the rest of the post makes it clear it was based on their personal experience. If that wasn't understood, then either the full post wasn't read or reading comprehension isn't as strong with some readers (ESL could factor).
What is the price-point of what you sell? Do you sell a $20 product, a $200 product, a $2000 product? Google has gotten expensive, a bidding for adwords with a $20 product has never seemed like a good idea to me.
It obviously fluctuates but to take the most recent one I updated, for a ~300 euro sale point (shipping excluded), physical product, in France, contested market (not a mass market product, many small vendors, no clear leader but also no brand attachment) my cpa runs at about 25 euros.
I have never sold below 100$ product, I have for services but I was taking a loss for the first 6 months per customer to acquire a base.
My best performing campaign in an entirely different market (education) is for a 4000$ product/1 year service combo, cpa is at 150$ but basically one out of every 10 leads is a sale (cyclical depending on time of year so this is a "make bank for three month" thing).
It's a $70bn ad network. All that revenue comes from highly liquid ad budgets. It's naive to conclude that fb ads "don't work" from anecdote... Not working most of the time is the norm for advertising, but the scale comes from the cases where it does work.
Why a throwaway account? Let's hear some examples where millions of independent thinkers and analysts supported the things you talk about for over a decade.
The advertisers that pour budgets into fb aren't suckers. They're highly roi-sensitive and data cognizant.
How do you know? Facebook obviously carries ads from huge brands, but also has a very long tail of smaller businesses and other advertisers. While it's reasonable to assume that whoever is spending a few million here and there on behalf of some major retail enterprise is watching the numbers pretty closely, I see no reason to assume that a thousand small businesses who are spending a few thousand here and there are doing the same. It's also worth noting that several things Facebook has done in the past have prompted reports of Major Brand X pulling $Y million in ad spend, so apparently the people who do have the sophisticated ROI monitoring don't always like what they see.
Ignore the downvotes. dalbasal presented concrete facts and sound reasoning. Some people's dislike for Facebook as a company doesn't change the validity of his arguments.
You're of course right, and I guess every sentence in that post of mine should be prefixed by "in my opinion / for my usage".
I will be honest and say that the prefix was assumed to be understood without having to be written, but I understand how without it my statement could be seen as something else (and rather obviously wrong).
I read it as such and assume most reasonable people did as well. I personally think online discourse would be much less noise if the Principal of Charity were more widely applied, as opposed to wanton application of the Principal of You Are Trivially Wrong and I Will Prove It.
Could the explanation be that different ad platforms perform better for different products or services?
I've heard (no direct experience) that FB leads tend to be high-quality when one is advertising, e.g., mobile games monetized through in-game purchasing.
For references my own ads have been looking for leads (not traffic, not subscription/registration), and the areas have been education, IT services, home help services and niche market retail sales (aka low sales but of several thousands per unit products).
> Each time you reply, a new rep is assigned the ticket
I recently had to open a support ticket with Paypal, they are exactly the same, unfortunately
I understand the incentives that led to this, but it's still crazy to think about it, since it's obviously a worse use of time for everyone (both me and their agents) just to get some metrics to go up
I think this is something that would be illegal in almost every country on earth. But there are probably more fun and cheaper things than getting Facebook in front of a judge.
Why use FB at all? I understand they have the audience, but if they treat you so poorly to the point of bankruptcy, what is the point? Aren't you encouraging bad behaviour by sticking with them?
Don't follow the platforms. Follow the advertisers.
Do whatever Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and the other big and hugely successful advertisers do. They have entire staffs to make sure their ads end up in the right places at the right prices.
See what your competitor is doing, and then do slightly better. Assuming you can afford it.
I used to run FB ads for my brick and mortar ca. 2016-18 to the tune of about $1k/day at it's height (I know that's not a lot necessarily just providing context). I never had any issues at all, the experience was actually pretty great. But, I've heard similar stories to yours from a lot of people so I know it happened I'm just curious if it was a change in the last couple years or if I just got insanely lucky.
Yes the ad platform has gotten more and more poorly managed and the relationship between media buyers and Facebook Ads more and more antagonistic. In the early days it was great.
I'd say it is kind of the new normal that companies treat their customers like criminals.
Locking away your backpack in a supermarket, bag inspections in the cinema, online tracking, and captchas. And good luck if you ever get annoyed at the barrage of unnecessary captchas and just click random stuff... You'll get shadowbanned.
Because nothing says "robot" more clearly than getting offended by useless interruptions.
> They also restrict your account so you can't do anything, but they leave the ads running and keep billing you. This bankrupts people who can't pause their unprofitable campaigns. My business partner was being billed ten grand daily via a banned/restricted account for weeks on end.
Why would you not just call your bank up, and get it charged back/refunded at that point? Thus Facebook would probably "ban" you (like most merchants when you do a chargeback), but since you're already restricted, who cares. At least you aren't losing money from them.
Its terrible, i cant even make the simple ads with the wizard anymore because at the last step there are JS errors in the console, in every browser. Support doesnt know what js errors are. nightmare.
Facebook requires that you pay them enormous money but you do not matter to them at all otherwise, as there are always more suckers out there to replace you if you leave. Both Google and Facebook understand that support costs them money, so they don't provide any, which lets them keep the money. Quality costs money, so not having quality lets them keep more money since people are desperate enough to put up with a lack of it to point ads at 2B people. The market for ads is completely captured by Facebook and Google, so you either put up with no support and no quality, or you can't play.
It's like living in a run down tenement, no matter how many rats and roaches you have to deal with due to a lack of maintenance, you have no choice if the alternative is the street. Yet the owner makes money no matter how horrific the building.
Alphabet had $34B net income in 2019, FB $18B. They could hire a legion of developers in any place which is not California/Switzerland, whose only responsibility would be bugfixing, and it would barely make a dent in their numbers.
There are those "mythical man month" problems along the lines of you can't hire legions of programmers and know that you are actually reducing bugs more than you are creating them. I am sure Facebook and Google could do a better job of support if it was there top priority, but it probably isn't just an issue of cost. It also requires attention, prioritization, engineering-- which each company probably has a finite amount of.
Wage != cost. It is just one component. Not sure of your definition of “developed world” but the median wage (less than average) of the US and other OECD countries is typically much closer to $30K.
For sure, when creating core technology it's better to have 2 people do it than to have 20 people. But when you have stable core and need to polish the edges, additional headcount with proper incentives should be able to make a difference. Part of the problem is (possibly biggest) lack of incentives all over the chain and focusing too much (solely) on a small set of business metrics.
I've had terrible customer service from Google's paid products as well. Google is intentionally customer service hostile overall because it's an area that defies automation.
I've worked with FB Business Manager since early 2014 and it has always been bad: slow, requires constant refreshing, and is extremely complex.
For comparison, AdEspresso is not nearly as complex but hugely more productive for doing split testing in Facebook campaigns. You build your ads on their interface and they submit via API.
It's really sad how the most well-payed engineers and designers are spending the best years of their lives working on this hostile platform. I'm so tired of being treated like garbage by these companies, I just hope there is some tipping point, a straw that finally breaks the camels back, that leads to their downfall.
When I was looking for a new SWE job in 2016 after my startup laid off a third of its employees the vast majority of open positions in other startups were in "analytics", marketing or advertising-related companies.
And similarly most of the positions that Amazon, Facebook and Google recruiters have approached me for are also in that field (even though I don't have any professional experience in that area, nor any keywords in my LinkedIn profile). I understand it's where the money is, and it's probably a good idea to work in a profit-center for once instead of being viewed as a cost-center by the MBAs, but I still have a soul.
It's really sad how the most well-payed engineers and designers are spending the best years of their lives working on this hostile platform
I'm at the age where I'm starting to look back at the various phases of my life and think about whether they were wasted or not.
A lot of my similarly-aged friends are doing the same. Some who worked for the wrong tech companies really regret it now. At the time they thought it was cool because they were living the tech dream. Now they wonder what it was all for.
Putting away all the evilness about Facebook away, why would they shoot themselves in their own foot? Even from a completely evil company perspective, advertising is the biggest revenue generating aspect of their whole ecosystem, what incentive do they have to cripple it (and at least, not immediately react to it)?
My guess is that there is an incentive for Facebook the company but not for any particular human working at Facebook.
Things are going well so inefficiency is fine (and it really may be fine), instead of fixing problems the best people are looking for new sources of growth.
This. Their ad interface has been a complete mess ever since its inception and the fact it has never received the attention the users' frontend gets, is indeed a suretell sign of a monopoly.
"Good luck using a better ad platform with no users to target your ads to".
The real alternative is simply not playing their game which is essentially an arms race with other advertisers anyway.
"Good luck using a better ad platform with no users to target your ads to".
That might be true for huge advertisers trying to reach mass-market audiences.
For smaller businesses operating in niche markets, it is plausible that you can get better returns through other promotional channels that appeal directly to those markets, without needing all the nasty tracking or dubiously effective targeting that come with the likes of Facebook and Google. The idea that you "have to" advertise on the big, generic networks because that's "where all your potential customers are" is well out of date, at least in our experience.
The "move fast and break things" is deeply ingrained in the company culture. It's probably in their engineers' training manuals, too.
They want to "get things done quickly" and inevitably break code elsewhere on the platform. The guy in the article is right - there's no other platform around where these sort of issues appear so often.
Here is the crazy part about Facebook Ad Manager. It had a targeting option called "React (Javascript Library)" in Additional interests. That has been removed since last month. But Angular and other frameworks still exist as a targeting option. It is crazy because React is a Facebook product. I literally have no idea why they deprecated their own product's targeting option. And as usual, if you ask anything from support, you get back canned replies. If you are in the drop-shipping world you'll know the daily gripes drop-shippers have with Facebook Ads. Like is said in the article, the first few days are decent and then it tanks completely. Someone at Facebook who knows what they are doing needs to get Facebook Ads under control. It was working fine until all these changes wrecked the platform!
The ad platform / business manager has always felt like several systems and products bolted together (which it probably is). There's too much legacy crap poking through and breaking things. I find understanding what's going on a struggle if I'm not using it day-to-day
Even doing a simple Instagram promotion in the App has to jump through the FB app for authentication which can hang and show me a blank screen.
The Ad industry has itself to blame. I tried FB Ad when they were new, and it was so terrible in every direction I stopped using the platform, entirely. If the advertisers would simply say "no", FB would be forced to improve.
Any time Facebook's UI is insulted, it's common to see the defence that it's a feature, not a bug, because clearly it works or a competitor would replace them. That time spent improving it is time wasted, because it doesn't make money. I see this as proof that a highly-scalable market doesn't optimise for good, it optimises for good-enough, and there's a lot of potential revenue lost between good and good-enough.
Sadly, competition is difficult to flourish in the current environment because of Facebook's market share and tactics.
It's not as bad in the US compared to other countries especially developing countries where Facebook is pretty much the only online channel. Sometimes, people only have access to Facebook and not the rest of the internet.
doesn't optimise for good, it optimises for good-enough
It's about pride. Not everyone has pride in their work, in their person, or in their actions.
I once worked with one of these "good enough" people. He bought his wife the cheapest things because they were "good enough." All he was focused on was the ticket price. Not the quality. Not the workmanship. Not going with a good company instead of a bad company.
It's become more common these days in everything from consumer goods to personal behavior. There was an article in the newspaper yesterday saying that sales of Folger's Crystals is up 14%. It's "good enough" coffee. There's a congressman up for re-election right now who admits to having an affair with an intern. His campaign doesn't hide this fact that would have made him un-electable ten years ago. His behavior is "good enough."
It's like all the Facebook and Google employees who are working on things that make the world a worse place. They're making money, so that's "good enough" for them. Someone else can be moral.
> Facebook is more worried about making [the platform] look good, like a Fisher Price toy, than how the [ad] platform actually performs.
They make it sound like a bad thing but pretty sure it's not true anyway. If Facebook saw that their ads performed the best with Comic Sans they would go with it and any design changes they make are surely done to increase ad revenue.
"Facebook is more concerned about making the platform look good than how it actually performs"
This has been a universal problem that I've observed in most tech companies i've worked with. Hyper-focus on the optics and less on the content / results.
I dont know if its a by product of giving front end design equal / greater weight than back end design / analytics or something more systematic like the apple design influence. Maybe both. Eitherway seems like websites are getting easier to look at, more clever, and less useful all across the board.
The biggest problem I have is the randomness of targeting desktop only. The option is only visible in one of the many flows that I can never remember how to find. Once you manage to actually enable it it randomly reverts back to also targeting mobile. My theory is that it does it when you edit some other parameter of the ad since the edit form is part of the flow where you don't have the option.
These kinds of posts always leave me wondering "what are they selling and for how much?" If you're selling a $12 ebook does Google work for you? Does Facebook? I feel like none of these platforms work very well for small-ticket items but Facebook seems to allow a lower-cost entry IMHO.
Those who receive bad support and stay probably are more desperate and in need of FB so you would expect the bad support group to be higher value customers on average (those who stay).
I used to own a large APAC agency. We had six figures in Facebook going through us every month. Issues like ad accounts being blocked, poor performance, etc received no feedback or conversation. Google over time assigned an account manager and improved support but Facebook was always awful. In one instance email went to Sheryl Sandberg, reply to which got forwarded down to 6 people who eventually gave us a 'this is policy' answer. I often advice founders to find friends who work there to get their issues resolved - because there is no formal sensible way to get it done.
I often advice founders to find friends who work there to get their issues resolved - because there is no formal sensible way to get it done.
Yes, Facebook is a complete train wreck, which survives in spite of its abysmal technology and support for its real customers rather than because of them. Even then, speaking only from the point of view of a much smaller business that has been a regular Facebook advertiser in the past, it probably left 33-50% of the money we would have spent with it on the table simply because we couldn't spend that money on the Facebook platform due to all the bugs. We redirected those funds to other channels instead. And yes, we too only got around Facebook's systems demanding nonsensical or literally impossible things that would have totally blocked our access at least once because we knew a senior dev who worked there and could escalate internally.
Unfortunately, this model seems to have become SOP for big tech service providers in recent years. Google are similarly non-communicative and have also provided such a bad experience to us as an advertiser that we stopped all our ads on their platforms for a long time. It's not just the big advertising platforms, either. Every payment service we use (including some that are darlings of HN) has messed us around horribly over the years, too. Unless you're spending literally millions of dollars per months with these tech giants, it seems they've decided it's not commercially sensible to offer any meaningful support, and presumably to accept that in some cases they'll lose customers entirely and damage their reputation as a result.
147 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadThat aside, IDK I read it in the group I was in and felt it would be liked here.
In a slightly more serious tone, the interviewee pulls out the old “won’t someone think of the small businesses?” line at the end. Is there any evidence that this is true? Is is primarily small businesses that are hurt with this kind of instability?
Marketing / advertising is a sub-sector of exploitation.
Modern advertising is technology deployed for the purpose of exploiting psychology to effect persuasion.
Marketing is not the same thing as advertising, but it can frequently be described identically.
The advertisers are effectively the customer, with the social media platform acting as a vehicle to reach the willing end-user.
With this model, a polished & efficient dashboard/UI for advertiser engagement is as important (if not more important) than the front-end experience that provides end-user engagement.
It might be the case that there is simply not enough subscription revenue in the world to fund such an operation without advertising. People forget just how much objectively good and useful stuff we have access to because of ad-supported $0 products. Hell, you could argue that Tensorflow and PyTorch themselves are ad-supported products.
The sticking point is that your old ad-supported classifieds paper and network news channels weren't surveilling you across the Web.
And as much as I think we need strict data privacy laws, it's hard to ignore the fact that Facebook ads used to be for penis pills and karate scams, but now for the most part are things that I (or at least my demographic) might want to buy.
I guess a vast majority of people simply don't want to pay if there is a somewhat acceptable free alternative.
The reason I do not pay for YouTube is that despite paying, I'm still the product - Google is still collecting every bit of data about me, to spam me on their other channels. Instead, I use YouTube (and every other Google product) logged-out, deleting cookies often[0]. I can't do that if I pay for YouTube.
[0] I used to reject cookies, but Google has become unusable that way -- everything goes back to defaults which are exceptionally bad for me.
For me, this is similar to why I won't pay for the New York Times subscription, either. I mainly only do stuff on both sites when I find a link to their site. I don't go to their site to do stuff on my own. Why would I subscribe to a site that I don't go to on my own? I do subscribe to ArsTechnica, for example, because I go there frequently.
Furthermore, I might not mind ads, but the ads on YouTube are very obnoxious. There's no intelligence, so you get weird situations like watching a 2 minute ad before being able to watch a 30 second video. Or ads cutting off the speaker mid word. Who thinks that's a good experience? If they can't get that stuff right, why would I pay them?
And on top of that, I find YouTube's "Hey did you know you can pay us money now?!?!?!" pop-ups all over the page to be obnoxious enough that I have decided I will never pay them any money.
Were I a regular visitor who wasn't so off-put by their ham-fisted advertising, I might have considered it, but now they've made going to their site so unpleasant I just avoid it if I can, or hold my nose for a few minutes when watching something with ads. Then I get away from their site as quickly as possible.
EDIT: for a while this reached 10 points, now it is at 2... makes me wonder, what I wrote so horribly wrong that deserves all these downvotes?
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-fixed-el...
1. This should probably be on by default with some indication it's "working"
2. It makes me so sad that I can't use extensions like this on my Android browser
Turning it on by default would break a lot of sites because they pop open one of those illegal cookie popups and disable scrolling until you've gone through it. If you can't see the window, all you get is a broken page with no explanation what went wrong.
The addon is open source[2] so if you'd like the feature nonetheless, you should be able to do it with only a few lines of code.
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio... [2]: https://github.com/andfarm/HideFixedElements
1) Try uMatrix. It blocks third-party JavaScript by default, which is what's used to power a lot of these elements. I don't see the big "subscribe me" bar at the bottom, so I assume uMatrix is preventing the JavaScript that creates it from loading. This will also help with performance on your "ancient workstation".
2) Reader mode seems to eliminate all of this cruft and give you just the meat of the article to read.
There's a newish rule on HN that we're not supposed to complain about the look of the linked web sites.
I don't mind when people point out that a site is unusable, because then I don't bother clicking through to it. But it's their site, so their rules.
But this is the game. I've spent millions of dollars on G/FB/etc and that's just how it goes.
This is insane.
> They also restrict your account so you can't do anything, but they leave the ads running and keep billing you. This bankrupts people who can't pause their unprofitable campaigns.
This is insane too.
The vague reporting of likely spend/speed of showing ads has always scared me of putting a large budget on a single campaign upfront.
There are a ton to criticize about google's adplatform (from user data handling to transparency to semi-monopoly to ...) but at the end of day if I make a proper well targeted campaign I get matching results.
Not all of them and there are some obvious false in there (ergo the need for transparency), but for every company who I have personnaly done the adwords campaign, as long as I disable the display network and make sure the campaign is well made, I get my bang for the buck.
On the other hand I'm still not sure why anyone who isn't scam or retargeting advertises on facebook, its "leads" are absolutely terrible in quality. I'm the kind who is willing to spend lots of time and a/b testing on my campaign (since at the end of the day it's the source of my money), but no matter what I do it costs me between 3 and 20 times more on facebook than on google to get the same number of end game sales.
It's a terrible ad network. When I dabbled in adult toys sales a while back I had to deal with adult networks ads and even THEY were better. Honestly it's impressive to me how bad it is.
(ads are purely textual and non retargeted, real products or services with great reviews)
I'm saying if I have a buck to put, it's worth several times more on adwords than on fb.
If you are traffic starved then sure fb could be usefull but I suspect the vast majority of small/medium business runs out of ad budget before they run out of adwords growth capabilities, and they value qualified leads much more than raw traffic.
Again OF COURSE it varies by business and I'm sure other people have the opposite experience, but mine has been clear cut and I shared it.
> gave yourself a lot of credit as a marketer
I in no way intended to do that. If I did, I apologize. I may be bad, or good, or decent, or terrible at it, I don't know. The point I was trying to make on that part of my original comment was simply: I do spend time on my campaign and A/B test difference, not as-in "I'm great", but as-in "I didn' just make my first campaign there in 5 minutes without trying to improve it or learn from my mistakes" because I think anecdotal evidences given from that point of view have no value at all.
So again, sorry if that is indeed what can be understood in what I wrote because that would be egoistical and wrong, but I genuinely don't believe that's what I wrote.
I have never sold below 100$ product, I have for services but I was taking a loss for the first 6 months per customer to acquire a base.
My best performing campaign in an entirely different market (education) is for a 4000$ product/1 year service combo, cpa is at 150$ but basically one out of every 10 leads is a sale (cyclical depending on time of year so this is a "make bank for three month" thing).
It's a $70bn ad network. All that revenue comes from highly liquid ad budgets. It's naive to conclude that fb ads "don't work" from anecdote... Not working most of the time is the norm for advertising, but the scale comes from the cases where it does work.
Anyway... this is just not the case here. The advertisers that pour budgets into fb aren't suckers. They're highly roi-sensitive and data cognizant.
All advertising fails much of the time, but when it doesn't it scales.
How do you know? Facebook obviously carries ads from huge brands, but also has a very long tail of smaller businesses and other advertisers. While it's reasonable to assume that whoever is spending a few million here and there on behalf of some major retail enterprise is watching the numbers pretty closely, I see no reason to assume that a thousand small businesses who are spending a few thousand here and there are doing the same. It's also worth noting that several things Facebook has done in the past have prompted reports of Major Brand X pulling $Y million in ad spend, so apparently the people who do have the sophisticated ROI monitoring don't always like what they see.
I will be honest and say that the prefix was assumed to be understood without having to be written, but I understand how without it my statement could be seen as something else (and rather obviously wrong).
I've heard (no direct experience) that FB leads tend to be high-quality when one is advertising, e.g., mobile games monetized through in-game purchasing.
For references my own ads have been looking for leads (not traffic, not subscription/registration), and the areas have been education, IT services, home help services and niche market retail sales (aka low sales but of several thousands per unit products).
I recently had to open a support ticket with Paypal, they are exactly the same, unfortunately
I understand the incentives that led to this, but it's still crazy to think about it, since it's obviously a worse use of time for everyone (both me and their agents) just to get some metrics to go up
This smells like a lawsuit.
Do whatever Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and the other big and hugely successful advertisers do. They have entire staffs to make sure their ads end up in the right places at the right prices.
See what your competitor is doing, and then do slightly better. Assuming you can afford it.
I used to run FB ads for my brick and mortar ca. 2016-18 to the tune of about $1k/day at it's height (I know that's not a lot necessarily just providing context). I never had any issues at all, the experience was actually pretty great. But, I've heard similar stories to yours from a lot of people so I know it happened I'm just curious if it was a change in the last couple years or if I just got insanely lucky.
Locking away your backpack in a supermarket, bag inspections in the cinema, online tracking, and captchas. And good luck if you ever get annoyed at the barrage of unnecessary captchas and just click random stuff... You'll get shadowbanned.
Because nothing says "robot" more clearly than getting offended by useless interruptions.
Why would you not just call your bank up, and get it charged back/refunded at that point? Thus Facebook would probably "ban" you (like most merchants when you do a chargeback), but since you're already restricted, who cares. At least you aren't losing money from them.
I think I had my account banned the last 3 times I created a new ad. None were against their policies. My account go reinstated each time but still.
It's like living in a run down tenement, no matter how many rats and roaches you have to deal with due to a lack of maintenance, you have no choice if the alternative is the street. Yet the owner makes money no matter how horrific the building.
I have no problem getting good customer support from Google's paid products (YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, Google One, etc).
For comparison, AdEspresso is not nearly as complex but hugely more productive for doing split testing in Facebook campaigns. You build your ads on their interface and they submit via API.
And similarly most of the positions that Amazon, Facebook and Google recruiters have approached me for are also in that field (even though I don't have any professional experience in that area, nor any keywords in my LinkedIn profile). I understand it's where the money is, and it's probably a good idea to work in a profit-center for once instead of being viewed as a cost-center by the MBAs, but I still have a soul.
I'm at the age where I'm starting to look back at the various phases of my life and think about whether they were wasted or not.
A lot of my similarly-aged friends are doing the same. Some who worked for the wrong tech companies really regret it now. At the time they thought it was cool because they were living the tech dream. Now they wonder what it was all for.
Things are going well so inefficiency is fine (and it really may be fine), instead of fixing problems the best people are looking for new sources of growth.
"Good luck using a better ad platform with no users to target your ads to".
The real alternative is simply not playing their game which is essentially an arms race with other advertisers anyway.
That might be true for huge advertisers trying to reach mass-market audiences.
For smaller businesses operating in niche markets, it is plausible that you can get better returns through other promotional channels that appeal directly to those markets, without needing all the nasty tracking or dubiously effective targeting that come with the likes of Facebook and Google. The idea that you "have to" advertise on the big, generic networks because that's "where all your potential customers are" is well out of date, at least in our experience.
They want to "get things done quickly" and inevitably break code elsewhere on the platform. The guy in the article is right - there's no other platform around where these sort of issues appear so often.
Which, in the case of the article, is exactly what happened.
Even doing a simple Instagram promotion in the App has to jump through the FB app for authentication which can hang and show me a blank screen.
Sadly, competition is difficult to flourish in the current environment because of Facebook's market share and tactics.
It's not as bad in the US compared to other countries especially developing countries where Facebook is pretty much the only online channel. Sometimes, people only have access to Facebook and not the rest of the internet.
It's about pride. Not everyone has pride in their work, in their person, or in their actions.
I once worked with one of these "good enough" people. He bought his wife the cheapest things because they were "good enough." All he was focused on was the ticket price. Not the quality. Not the workmanship. Not going with a good company instead of a bad company.
It's become more common these days in everything from consumer goods to personal behavior. There was an article in the newspaper yesterday saying that sales of Folger's Crystals is up 14%. It's "good enough" coffee. There's a congressman up for re-election right now who admits to having an affair with an intern. His campaign doesn't hide this fact that would have made him un-electable ten years ago. His behavior is "good enough."
It's like all the Facebook and Google employees who are working on things that make the world a worse place. They're making money, so that's "good enough" for them. Someone else can be moral.
They make it sound like a bad thing but pretty sure it's not true anyway. If Facebook saw that their ads performed the best with Comic Sans they would go with it and any design changes they make are surely done to increase ad revenue.
This has been a universal problem that I've observed in most tech companies i've worked with. Hyper-focus on the optics and less on the content / results.
I dont know if its a by product of giving front end design equal / greater weight than back end design / analytics or something more systematic like the apple design influence. Maybe both. Eitherway seems like websites are getting easier to look at, more clever, and less useful all across the board.
Maybe customers receiving bad support spend just as much, or possibly even more, than those receiving good support.
Yes, Facebook is a complete train wreck, which survives in spite of its abysmal technology and support for its real customers rather than because of them. Even then, speaking only from the point of view of a much smaller business that has been a regular Facebook advertiser in the past, it probably left 33-50% of the money we would have spent with it on the table simply because we couldn't spend that money on the Facebook platform due to all the bugs. We redirected those funds to other channels instead. And yes, we too only got around Facebook's systems demanding nonsensical or literally impossible things that would have totally blocked our access at least once because we knew a senior dev who worked there and could escalate internally.
Unfortunately, this model seems to have become SOP for big tech service providers in recent years. Google are similarly non-communicative and have also provided such a bad experience to us as an advertiser that we stopped all our ads on their platforms for a long time. It's not just the big advertising platforms, either. Every payment service we use (including some that are darlings of HN) has messed us around horribly over the years, too. Unless you're spending literally millions of dollars per months with these tech giants, it seems they've decided it's not commercially sensible to offer any meaningful support, and presumably to accept that in some cases they'll lose customers entirely and damage their reputation as a result.