'They spent thousands of dollars a month to buy advertisements on social media groups, while carefully tracking the size of U.S. audiences they reached, according to the indictment.'
This sounds like an incredibly well funded, sophisticated operation. They bought some ads and used google analytics.
They spent thousands just on ads. They also had a dedicated team running all their sock puppet accounts. That probably cost a lot too, it's just known how much.
That always struck me as weird too. A few thousand a month is barely a drop in the bucket as far as ad campaigns go.
Either the CPM was so low that practically nobody was seeing the ads or the CPC was so high that the budget would be exhausted rapidly (and practically nobody would see the ads).
I'm in no way an expert in social media advertising, but the claims that I've heard are that the ad buys were hyper-targeted to swing districts. Incidentally, it's been suggested that this implies that the Russians were in secret coordination with Cambridge Analytica (the data firm that worked with the Trump Campaign). On the other hand, I think it's consistent with the following model:
Assume that Putin has a longstanding grudge against Clinton and wants to undermine what he assumes will be her presidency [1]. Let's further assume that the budget for this operation will be low—on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands (plus salary for operatives), compared to the hundreds of millions spent by the campaigns [2]. Any reasonably savvy head of this operation would lean towards a start-up model—i.e. very aggressively targeting swing districts. Thinking up ways to target the most swing-able people for the fewest number of dollars is very much worth your time if your time is relatively inexpensive and you don't have tons and tons of money to spend. Is it possible that they received targeting data from people associated with the campaign? Sure, but I don't think that hypertargeting implies that they did.
Ah! Duh on me then, I'd not even considered the targeting possibilities. That makes a lot more sense and would make even a limited budget go a lot further. Adwords at least will let you go as granular city-by-city, and I'd guess Facebook will do the same.
"Thousands" is less than "tens of thousands" or any larger number, which to me says <=$9,999. And the millions applies to the whole operation, not the ads.
I was commenting on the perceived strangeness of a sub-10K monthly advertising budget given the much larger amounts of money in play from legitimate interests, nothing further.
This sounds like an incredibly well funded, sophisticated operation. They bought some ads and used google analytics.