>Advertisers pay Facebook on the assumption that the people viewing and clicking their ads are real. But that’s often not the case.
Actually, advertisers already know there are lots of fake (Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat) accounts. Likewise, advertisers also know that newspaper & magazine circulation numbers are inflated (even though the circulation #s are "audited"). Ad buyers also know that tv audience sizes are inflated as well.
What matters in the end is if there's a positive ROI on the ad spending. The advertisers can measure the uptick on sales and if the ads worked, they renew their ad spend on Facebook. The majority of Facebook revenues come from repeat business of advertisers who already know about fake users. In contrast, if the majority of Facebook revenue were to come from 1st time ad buyers that were easily fooled by fake accounts, that's when the false user count would drastically affect revenue.
I'm the last person to defend Facebook but just wanted to highlight how advertisers think. For the Facebook ponzi scheme to fall apart, the ads have to stop working. This has happened before. In the 1990s, advertisers were buying Yahoo banner ads. But after the initial novelty of naive web surfers clicking on them, advertisers quickly realized banner ads were worthless. As a result, Yahoo revenues plunged.
"What matters in the end is if there's a positive ROI on the ad spending."
This would make logical sense. BUT! it turns to not be the case. Larger accounts: Pepsi, Johnson&Johnson, Tmobile, etc tend to just take a massive budget and blow it on ads. They don't necessarily care about the ROI or click tracking. They just want to shove banners in front of people's faces before the quarter ends. What is nuts -- is that these large accounts (we used to call it dumb money) are almost all of the ad revenue. Accounts that care about click ROI tend to be low budget -- that is why facebook/google will push these people into self service ad portals.
This is wrong to the point of being backwards (I've worked on building these systems). The most demanding clients from an ROI perspective are _always_ the biggest clients, since they're the the only players who can support an employee whose full time job is to care about this ROI. Seriously, look at the features of the ad portals - they're obviously built for major advertisers. Features are prioritized based on how much business they will bring in, thus large advertisers drive the product roadmap.
Small businesses care about ROI in the abstract, but are generally so time strapped just running their business that they barely have time to even set up attribution or measure ROI beyond "I spent this much and it kind of seemed like I got more business".
Pepsi cares about sales rates of Pepsi products in $localRegion when they run an ad campaign in $localRegion.
Major multinationals are sophisticated enough to correlate their ad campaigns with product sales. And they have the resources to run numerous ad campaigns simultaneously in multiple regions and iterate on the campaigns that work. Smaller players are less able to do that, and are forced to rely more on metadata like click through rates because they can't see the bigger picture.
Pepsi cares about making you read the word "Pepsi" over and over until you buy one, but you don't buy them from pepsi.com, you buy them at every restaurant/store you go to.
Is that really true for Facebook ads? My feed contains relatively few ads from companies like Pepsi, J&J, T-Mobile, etc trying to do brand building. Most ads are from somewhat smaller companies trying to get me to buy a specific product right now.
Those brands usually try to connect with existing brands so events/people sponserships are more rewarding and global vs facebook ads who generally want you to click now while targeting a smaller segment.. the smaller the better
That highlights something I noticed about advertising - it is ironically meta in that what is needed is to convince the buyer that it is the source of their success.
Many have "totemic" advertising where they think slapping their name everywhere will be what gives them success when they are already well known and widespread enough that people wouldn't forget about them if they stopped advertising tomorrow. Brand awareness is a thing but it seems overhyped - especially when it forgets the downsides of obnoxious advertising.
If as the old joke the moon was painted a cocacola logo that would give brand awareness in perpetuity but it would piss off a lot of people rightfully.
Pissed off people are still more likely to buy that brand because to do otherwise would require a thought override. These ads speak to the subconscious your anger is more conscious and will ebb and flow.
I started out working as a senior Facebook / social app developer at digital agencies. Saw it firsthand.
Agencies would hire me late in the process, when most of the campaign was specced out (as some silly app on a page). I saw many times that the campaign wouldn’t really be that viral etc. But the design had already been nailed down and it was my job to make it happen.
So what they would do is just buy 50,000 likes and maybe get some organic action. They showed the results, the guys at the brand showed the results to the giys upstairs, everyone seemed happy.
It was one of the things that made me realize current social media platforms were about fake or shallow online engagement, and gave me the impetus to start Qbix
> What matters in the end is if there's a positive ROI on the ad spending
From what I've seen, the big brands don't really know the ROI of their ad spending. They allocate X% to digital, Y% to outdoor, Z% to TV, etc. Then they sub-allocate across channels within each category. It's not really about ROI.
And smaller advertisers don't have much in-house capability to measure ROI. Instead they rely on Facebook's own analytics.
Only a handful of companies I've seen actually build their own analytics, measure customer acquisition cost, and match acquisition cost to lifetime value for specific customer cohorts.
The smaller firms that do their own analytics invariably discover that 95% of the traffic from "paid social" Facebook ads is low quality, high churn, with deeply negative ROI. And it's impossible to isolate the 5% high quality, low churn, positive ROI traffic and just pay for that.
Basically everything about this is wrong. Big brands invest far more in measurement than small advertisers. Smaller companies who do their own analytics and seriously invest in Facebook ads tend to find that they perform better than all but their most core search keywords.
It's true that "seriously investing" in Facebook ads is much more involved than the equivalent investment in search ads, but it's absolutely false that the traffic from Facebook ads is definitionally low quality.
I don't know about the experience with others, but I've built a few different online businesses over the years and I am always tracking my ROI on digital spend intensely. I have almost always found Facebook traffic to be extremely poor, especially when compared to Adwords. Obviously display vs. search advertising naturally have big differences in conversion rates, but the difference was always way more extreme than I had anticipated, to the point where I've just completely given up on Facebook entirely.
In general, last-click methods will substantially under-value FB and over-value Google. This occurs because you see an ad on FB, don't click, but search to get back to the website, and click on a Google ad.
I've found, that for a lot of b2c businesses, FB provides extremely good ROI. Google is much better for b2b though.
If by "perform better" you mean "generate traffic" then I agree with you. Facebook ads really do result in a lot of clicks.
And if you're running a political or awareness campaign, maybe that's what you want. But it's hard to measure ROI for this kind of campaign except by comparison with other traffic sources.
On the other hand, if you're selling a product or service, and you track narrow cohorts from prospect through conversion, repeat buy, defection and churn, you can compare total acquisition cost of the cohort with LTV of the cohort.
Regardless of the product or service, I usually see CAC >> LTV at the cohort level.
Within a cohort, usually < 10% of customers have CAC <= LTV, but it's nearly impossible to target this subset in advance, so negative ROI dominates the cohort.
Ads that "work" are more a case of "can we show numbers that the people upstairs will consider ok?" than "can we prove these ads have contributed to our bottom line?".
The old "I know half of what I spend on advertising is wasted but the problem is I don't know which half" still applies, despite all the promises of digital advertising.
>For the Facebook ponzi scheme to fall apart, the ads have to stop working.
I am taking the Ponzi scheme here refers to numbers of users? Because for Facebook's Client, it is obvious that Ads is working and bringing a positive ROI. And these ROI are not paid out directly by Facebook ( which could easily distort the number ) but results measured through other channels. Which means from Facebook's clients perspective it is not a Ponzi scheme at all, as there is nothing to lose from its Client.
This was an interesting piece. The author pretty clearly states upfront that he's been criticizing MZ for years, which I found to be strangely refreshing as opposed to trying to claim a neutral position.
As far as the account fraud is concerned, I've wondered about this throughout the tech industry for pretty much my whole career. Most companies I've worked for have done all kinds of things to pad usage and retention stats in order to appease investors, ranging from ethically innocuous to "holy shit I need to start looking for a new gig". Online advertising in particular has been the worst at this in my professional experience.
What's being communicated to the advertiser isn't the whole truth: it's a selectively, surgically crafted subset of the truth. The first time I saw "The Big Short", I couldn't help but think about how similar the ad company I worked for behaved like the credit rating agencies. We knew that if our reporting showed that we were ineffective, we'd lose customers, so we did all kinds of things to make the reporting look good.
The accusation that one of the largest companies in the world is doing pretty much the same thing doesn't surprise me at all.
I have some knowledge of folks who have ad spend on facebook. For niche / targeting spend, facebook was totally amazing at least a year or two ago. The returns on facebook far surpassed the returns these companies saw elsewhere. I don't use facebook, so was surprised by that.
Do people really not evaluate return on ad spend against revenue?
In this case the client saw a direct link between marketing and revenue and I'm not sure why they would care if some of the views were from fake accounts. Views on the bus stop ad might be from someone homeless or other unlikely purchasers.
"Facebook reported advertising revenue at $16.6 billion for the final quarter of last year, up 30 percent year-over-year."
I guess all these companies are idiots for advertising on Instagram and facebook (I find this totally hard to believe)
I think the main point the author was trying to make is that Facebook isn't being kosher when it comes to dealing with fraudulent accounts, which isn't necessarily adversely impacting the advertising side of things. My guess is that advertisers overall are happy with their FB ad campaigns, and FB is being less and less transparent with investors when it comes to user growth. Both of those scenarios could pretty easily coexist.
Is there any independent audit of any advertising platform's data at all? Like Facebook tells me that 10,000 people saw my ads and I have no real way of verifying that. And I'm supposed to believe that Facebook is being honest even though Facebook has all the incentive to falsify numbers
Game companies that buy ads for mobile installs-- a huge advertising market-- pay per install. Of course fraudulent companies create fake installs from fake accounts. But when you get an app installed a thousand times it is possible to judge the quality of those installs. Where they are, if they are real people, etc. It is clear that the results vary wildly and from my subjective perspective ad fraud is at least as bad as it has ever been.
Yeah, I always find it bizarre when people make these naive claims. Of course number of impressions are a proxy for reality, but when the rubber hits the road advertisers know what value they are getting. They are leveraging the microtargeting and the cookie tracking an God knows what else zuck has cooked up. Facebook, Google etc are fundamentally profitable places to advertise -when done intelligently. Smart, repeat advertisers pay Facebook a lot of money for this privilege.
Arguments like this always strike me the same way as the arguments about real-estate around 2007: “Smart bankers would never invest billions in bad loans”.
Maybe advertisers know what they’re getting. Or maybe they think they know but are actually willfully ignorant of something important because it goes against “common knowledge”.
Without some kind of third party auditing it’s impossible to tell, and I haven’t seen anything like that from Facebook.
The problem is you cannot audit as much as you would like. The important part is a real human sees the ad. (human with the desirable characteristic is a secondary factor). However you cannot measure the effects of an ad easily because there are too many confounding factors: people who buy because of a previous ad, people who would buy anyway, people who will buy in a few years.
We do know the companies that have cut advertising too much have lost market share. However when you have a lot of ads it is hard to figure out which ad made the difference.
Isn’t that basically the point of Nielsen? They go to a lot of trouble to get trustworthy stats about TV viewership so that advertisers can make informed purchase decisions wrt. both stations and programs.
Several companies have tried to fill that role online, but not to much success.
The basic attention token (https://basicattentiontoken.org/) seems to have the right characteristics and incentives to fill this role. Any ideas why the others have failed so far? It’s hard to insert yourself as a value-adding middleman in an existing marketplace unless consensus agrees the current configuration is in crisis. It’d be interesting if anyone could find a way to do this for Amazon’s commingled counterfeit inventory, for example.
I don’t know much about the current state of adtech, so I’d be hard-pressed to make specific recommendations. As a broadcast medium, TV stations had basically no data about the number of viewers that they had; Nielsen instrumented a representative sample of consumer TVs and the sold that data to both stations and advertisers.
That is the issue with closed ad inventory. On ad exchanges (which are slowly dying), you can use a host of third party companies (such as Integral Ad Science) to run more or less sophisticated verifications on the quality of the inventory.
The author claims to have invented Facebook, yet has presented no compelling evidence whatsoever for anything beyond "I did actually know Zuck when he created Facebook". He's not at all credible in my opinion.
>Starting in August 2003, Think released a web based student portal called houseSYSTEM through a Harvard student group. This software was designed to make life easier for students, faculty, and alumni. By September 2003, houseSYSTEM featured a section (devised and implemented by Greenspan) called “The Universal Face Book” (sometimes called “The Face Book”).
Which is an odd claim because I was under the impression that "face books" weren't an original concept.
It's not an original concept, it originated in print, and inspired the name[0]. So basically, he's claiming that he contributed to a web portal that included the _name_ "Face Book", hence he invented Facebook.
It was all about the MAU, and that's not a GAAP metric. Evaluate the company based on your own metrics and make your own conclusions.
If this person wants to short facebook because they don't think it will maintain earnings 26 years or whatever P/E multiple it is currently trading at, that's fine.
The simple fact is that companies can grow and evolve. When Cisco got started, they sold switches. Eventually people stopped buying that switch, so they made a different one. Then they saw that people needed routers. And wifi. And teleconference.
FB is far from a static company with an unchanging platform - definitely not a ponzi scheme, unless you consider every company that funds current expenses with expected growth a ponzi scheme. I'm going to take a stance on the author; he is a nut job.
I don't see the evidence here as being compelling at all.
Even if you could prove that Facebook is filling the gaps between new users and churned users by creating fake accounts, you also have to draw a line between those fake accounts and the company's bottom line.
Fake accounts don't buy products, so if advertisers are making decisions off of CAC, numbers potentially inflated by fake accounts (reach, clicks, engagement, etc.) are secondary.
Facebook's ad power comes from their egregious data collection and lack of privacy concerns. The more they know about you, the more relevant your ads will be and the more likely someone seeing your ad will be to buy. And if advertisers can draw a line that says "if I spend $50 on Facebook ads, I'll increase my bottom-line line $100", they'll spend money until it's no longer profitable to do so.
That said, it's not like all Facebook advertisers are acting rationally in that manner. I don't know what % of Facebook revenue to coming from unsophisticated advertisers, so it's possible that they could be making a lot of money from people focusing on fuzzy metrics like reach.
> The more they know about you, the more relevant your ads will be and the more likely someone seeing your ad will be to buy
How much ACTUAL evidence is there for this?
Take Amazon for instance... they know everything I have bought from them ever and employ some mega-smart people but the number of times I buy something and they then recommend either absolute shite or the same damn thing is not an insignificant number.
Another thing is if I am an advertiser and FB says "your ad was seen by 20 million people", how can I dispute this? It's a closed system.
I am sorry... but from my comfy armchair position I'm calling shenanigans on mass-data collection in advertising being able to move the profitability needle in a measurable way.
I think you are missing the point here and thinking too much about pay per impression. Professional ad buyers don't measure their ad effectiveness in "people reached". That is for chumps who want to be ripped off, and large companies that have too much to burn on their marketing departments.
The people who use ads effectively are buying pay per click and measuring the real conversions to measure effectiveness. Bots don't buy the products after they click through, but the real clicks often do. (For some categories you can get as high as 10% conversion rate to a real sale from real clicks that you buy because ad targeting on platforms like Facebook and Amazon is really, really good. If your ad is good and your product is good then the ad targeting will get your ad in front of the right people a lot of the time.)
If you are smart you don't pay for impressions, you pay for clicks and conversions, and you measure how many of those clicks convert into sales to make sure you are coming out net positive. Sure there are always going to be some fake clicks but there are still enough real clicks that convert to make it worth it. A bit of click fraud is just the cost of doing business.
Lets say I'm selling a product that has a 20% profit margin. I might be willing to pay up to 10% of my profit margin on ads if the increased number of real conversions that result will more than double my sales, allowing me to make more money overall than I would have otherwise.
There are definitely a lot of people out there who are foolishly wasting money on buying impressions, but there are also tons of people making ludicrous amounts of money from well targeted ads that convert into increased sales of their product
You are over-simplifying. Almost all of the metrics Facebook will feed you when you setup an account are on a view-through attribution basis. Yes, there will be some clicks, but if you attribute revenue from Facebook by clicks only, it will look terrible. This is an old problem for anyone that has spent time with display ad platforms. So, you install a facebook pixel on your checkout, and if the person making a purchase saw your ad on Facebook, Facebook's reporting console will take credit for that. Thats view-through attribution and it highly overstates the credit Facebook should receive for making the sale, but there's not much you can do to measure it otherwise. So what do you do?
The answer is, you setup a holdout test. Facebook has a black-box solution for helping with this, but it is a huge conflict of interest to let Facebook handle your test. The thing to do then is set up the test on your own platform. That is a massive undertaking, and any business that doesn't have a significantly sized engineering and analytic team doesn't stand a chance.
So yea, people look at things like reach, and view through conversions, and it would be very hard not too or they might not have the means to do something more sophisticated. Fake accounts undeniably puff of numbers for these people, and they should be taken to court for not giving a shit about that fact.
Facebook are 100% not going to lie to you through their experimentation platform. The whole point of it is to help people accurately measure the results of their ads.
In general, it will be extremely difficult to run accurate tests on FB (or indeed Google) ads without using some of their infrastructure, as these platforms can balance users appropriately in terms of likely response to your ads (for instance, ensuring that both ads are shown to people with approximately the same click probability).
Without this, you run the risk of making bad decisions because one ad got served to users who were far more likely to convert.
Of course you should definitely run your own tests, but I wouldn't completely discount the platform's tools as they do have advantages which are impossible for you to replicate (i.e. balancing users in terms of response rates in each condition).
Yea, but what are they using to analyze your results? You literally have no idea how robust (or not) their statistical methods are. It's been my experience that 3rd party solutions are notoriously shoddy in this department. They have no incentive to be robust.
AFAIK (it's been over a year), they use intent to treat approach, and only remove users from the experiment after they have already been matched to an ad. This allows them to ensure that the users are matched in terms of expected conversion rate, which allows for valid results.
I believe that there were rumours of using bayesian analysis in the future, but I believe it's a two-sided p-value based on the differences in your chosen outcome.
I worked in ads.
You individually is not what makes advertising useful or lucrative. Aggregate numbers do.
How many people see ads on tv, and buy the thing they saw right away? You guessed it, it is probably less than a percent.
There are so many impressions in the world, from billons of users. You cannot expect each of them to do meaningful conversions. On a super off the cuff calculation, assume each user see 100 ads a day, 2b users makes it 200b impressions. If each user generously converts once a day, that is 1%. If they convert every other day, it is 0.5% per impression.
I particularly left clicks out went straight to conversions. Usual flow goes like this: query, matched query, impression, click, conversion... The funnel is super large and drop offs are huge.
Are ad-hating HN users ever going to say that ads might work sometimes, instead of relying on random anecdotes and 0 data or facts from an extremely small and biased sub-population who is never the target of advertising campaigns anyway?
Or are you really arguing that >$500B businesses like Google and FB are complete fraud?
I hate ads, but I agree with you. I hate them because they work. Or at least, all this money wouldn't be flowing into the industry if it really wasn't working. Maybe FB is fraudulent due to the accusations in the article (inflating numbers to advertisers), I don't know; that's unrelated to the issue of giant, innovative tech companies basing their entire business models on advertising things to their non-paying users, and visitors, and also anyone else who ever visits pretty much any other website on the Internet.
Advertising isn't fraud. Neither is data collection. It's just unfortunate. I wouldn't even be surprised if many Google and Facebook employees agree it's unfortunate. They're probably thinking: what else exactly can we do to sustain all these non-paying users?
It's really not even the data collection that bothers me so much as the fact that it's being used for such a... dumb purpose, I guess. The best minds of our generation are dedicating their life's work and all of their brainpower to thinking about how to get people to see or click more advertisements. What a waste.
I didn't claim that ads don't work... far from it: I've seen how easily people are persuaded to part with money so I believe ads DO work!
What I have issues with is using masses of data to persuade someone to buy something having any more significant ability to make them part with their cash than doing it contextually.
I realise I said "measureable effect" and I kind of meant that in my original statement but I also mean measurable enough that my privacy is traded for an extra fraction of a percent.
By way of example, lets say a contextual banner ad at the top of an article for the new Hyundai i30 Fastback N (I just bought one of those :) with a discount code to buy one might persuade 10% of people to click and 10% of them to buy. (Illustrative figures, don't throw your back out over their accuracy)
If adtech companies hoover up data across the web about my buying habits, browsing habits, sexual habits etc. can they legitimately say they can make a measurably larger percentage of people buy that car (or handbag, shoes whatever)?
And if so, what kind of numbers? Is it 10.1%? 30%?
And is that trade-off worth me allowing them to do that?
The issue isn't making a larger percentage of the people buy, it is a larger percentage of the people advertised to buy.
Alcohol companies don't want to waste their advertising money on people who belong to a region that doesn't consume alcohol. Car companies don't want to advertise to the poor with bad credit - by contrast scammy used car dealers want to advertise to those with bad credit and not reach the rich.
Of course there is a real downside to this: you will miss someone who should be a target because they look like the type of person is not. The person who just left his restrictive religion. The poor person who is starting what will turn out to be a successful business. Thus big companies often to have a component of ad budget that reach everybody without concern for who buys - just to make sure they don't completely miss someone worth targeting.
It works (Has a positive RoI) up to a particular spend/impression, and doesn't work after a particular spend/impression.
The purpose of all the data collection/targeted advertising/remarketing, is to increase the efficiency of these ads, and to increase the threshold when it goes from 'works' to 'doesn't work'.
To put it another way - I can't think of many businesses where showing ads for 1 cent / 1000 impressions would not be worth it. I can't think of many businesses where showing ads for $1000 / 1000 impressions would be worth it. Depending on the business, there's some inflection point between those two numbers. More targeted advertising makes the implicit promise that the inflection point for <your particular business> is higher, then in an untargeted advertising platform.
What incentives are there to claim that their company can sell your company access to their secret sauce which greatly improves some metric which is notoriously hard to measure?
It's very easy to measure the success of online advertising campaigns, because you can directly measure how many people your ads are reaching and which of those people end up buying your stuff.
Even if it weren't, I still don't see the incentive. If you don't think that it matters what your secret sauce actually is, why use mass data collection rather than something more popular?
No it is not easy to measure. You can measure immediate success, but not delayed success. I just bought my first order for a product that I last saw advertised on facebook a couple years ago. At the time the product looked interesting but didn't fit my needs, but a couple years latter and I remembered them. Since I've moved and used firefox directly to access their website it will be very hard to put my order with the ad (they have probably closed the books on the original ad where I'm marked as a click but no buy)
I was all geared up to play devil's advocate here, but any response I could formulate seemed to distill down to data being extremely powerful, and so undermined the thesis.
Still though, if Facebook has solved the "50% of my ad spend works, I just don't know which 50%" issue for companies like Mercedes Benz and Coca Cola then that would be mighty impressive.
I'm working with comscore right now (an aggregator of stats for advertisers) and can confirm it's all a house of cards. there's no quality controls or oversight into what's reported.
In my companies and for my clients, I track up-tick in sales for each campaign on each platform. Sometimes the problem is conversion (that's on me/us), and sometimes bad targeting or whatever.
If FB isn't one of the lowest channels (platforms) for CAC that is greatly exceeded by LTV (or even <3 mo breakeven), then it isn't a channel you use for that product!
I don't think Amazon is a good comparison here. Yes, they have a lot of data on the things that you buy but at the core, Amazon is a logistics company. Advertising is not their profit center.
Facebook and Google are both advertising companies. That is how they make money so naturally that is also where a lot of their R&D spend goes.
Imagine you're Coca-Cola. You have an on-line ad budget for this quarter. Where should you spend it? Probably the places that have the most reach: Google and Facebook. Do you know how many cans of Coke or other drink brands you will sell based on these ads this quarter? No. Is there any way for you to figure it out? No. All you know are the numbers Facebook tells you. And those numbers look pretty good. This is how "sophisticated" ad buyers work.
It's actually far easier for a tiny business to measure the conversation rate between clicks and actual purchases. Big ad buyers throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and they rarely bother truly measuring because that's often impossible.
The entire ad industry is based on fuzzy metrics. Within that fuzz is an awful lot of room for fraud.
Is this how you think ads work? This is horribly naive. If an ad exec at a large corporation thinks this way they should be fired immediately.
To answer directly : of course you can measure how effective your FB ads are. Pick two markets with similar demographics and a timeframe. Run FB ads in one market as an experiment and traditional media ads in another market as a control. If sales increase in the experiment market vs the control that is strong evidence that FB ads are more effective than traditional marketing. For higher confidence repeat the test with multiple markets and multiple controls.
That experiment took me 30 seconds to think of. A sophisticated marketer can probably come up with one that gives even more solid evidence.
Yeah, I also worked in ads and your experiment for a brand of any reasonable size is effectively impossible. You will have a challenge:
- Finding a time where there isn't some global event (e.g. oscars, olympics, etc)
- Weather effects (it was hot/cold so they went out/didn't go out)
- Local effects (Warriors just won the championship)
- SUPER local effects (it was prom at this high school)
- Brand history (Coke does better in ATL than Pepsi)
- etc.
And then, even if you did, ACTUALLY being able to measure impact on anything but ultra-transactional things (e.g. buying a movie ticket) is super hard/expensive too. You're going to run a survey after each experiment? And THEN, even if you DID run a survey, maybe it worked for one brand and one brand only! Maybe it doesn't even cross over to other brands in a category, let alone other categories.
Look - scientifically speaking, sure, you should be able to do what you describe. Almost none of the time does that work in the real world.
Are you saying a good ad manager shouldn’t try to do measurements though? That seems like a cop out. Why would you be making the big bucks if you can’t control for all this noise?
Ad campaigns are super expensive. If I were an exec at a company managing a campaign I’d want to see solid metrics and impact on sales, otherwise what’s all this money for?
In other words, if you can’t tell the difference between spending the money and not, don’t spend it.
Yeah, it's very very difficult for brands which are bought offline.
That's why Google are working with mastercard to get hash credit card transactions.
Additionally, Amazon are probably in a really good place to do marketing for CPG brands, as people actually purchase those on Amazon and thus they can track conversions (whereas FB and Google aren't great for these kinds of advertisers).
>Pick two markets with similar demographics and a timeframe. Run FB ads in one market as an experiment and traditional media ads in another market as a control. If sales increase in the experiment market vs the control that is strong evidence that FB ads are more effective than traditional marketing.
This sounds like an incredibly naive and expensive experiment, filled to the brim with noise.
Their video platform was based on lies and junk metrics. People still spent millions and in many cases revamped their entire organizational structure around video only to see it fail.
It's important to understand that Greenspan (who, incidentally, comments on hacker news a fair bit as https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thinkcomp and submitted this link) is not an unbiased observer here. He's had an ongoing feud with Zuck/FB for years and years and years.
From reading his writings on this, and other topics, it's clear that he is extremely bitter about virtually all things related to Facebook.
He also undertook a multi-year quixotic series of lawsuits against California and other entities over what he felt were unfair regulations on money services businesses.
Lying to advertisers would not make Facebook a ponzi scheme. A ponzi scheme is when early investors get paid with "profits" that are actually later investors' money.
No one is doubting that Facebook is making genuine revenue, although they may be misleading people to earn that revenue.
early investors get paid with "profits" that are actually later investors' money
But seriously, that's actually what happens in the real world in % of "successful" startups. I think context is important in pointing to something as a ponzi scheme
About a year ago we had to pretty much shut down FB advertising as we simply could not come close to rectifying the click numbers they were reporting to us. That trust broke down much further when you considered conversions and more human-like activity down our funnels.
That said, for another business, FB is absolutely killing it for us.
The difference is in target market size and niche.
Which is the bit I don't get. Even if FB say they have a trillion users, so what. Advertisers will advertise and pay based on the results they are seeing just like you did.
Eric Schmidt made pretty much the same point about Google fake clicks.
Granted this is trickier if you don't have an easy way to determine if your advert has converted to a result e.g. somebody who is just looking to raise brand awareness.
Jeah, tried several times. With several different pictures, text, angle, color, font etc to advertise on facebook. 11k views one click or no click mostly lol.
I guess it is too niche. (African bangles and stuff, hand made)
Really enjoyed the article, but have to point out the obvious: Fraud =/= Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes are a payout model where money from later investors is used to pay off earlier investors.
There are so many ways in which I'd like to contradict this article, but I'll stick to just one.
> While they reveal a problem escalating at an alarming rate and are constantly being revised upward .. in Q2 2017
In Q4 2017 the method for measuring the prevalence of fake accounts was changed to something more accurate. The number of fake accounts wasn't "escalating at an alarming rate", it was comparable to the number in the previous quarter.
“I actually did think about integrating it into houseSYSTEM before you even suggested it, but I decided that it’s probably best to keep them separated at least for now.”
Oooh, there's a blast from the past. Why do so many Harvard undergrads talk like this? (I was as guilty as anyone.)
First, the superfluous "actually". In the late 1990s, every Yard conversation was peppered with "actually". I was on the phone with an HR person for my first job out of school, I dropped an "actually" on her, and she (rightfully) read me the riot act. (So, actually, the idiom could have changed by now... it apparently hadn't changed much at the time Zuck attended.)
Second, the implicit comparison between the great stupendous thing that "I" did with the minimal barely-worth-mentioning thing that "you" did. As if "thinking" and "deciding" were somehow so much more important than "suggesting". We can be certain that if the conversation roles were reversed then the implied relative importance of the different actions would also have been reversed. This was just a particular flavor of a more general rhetorical activity we called "flexing", back then. Lots of intimidated kids, attempting to intimidate in turn.
It's kinda defensive in an 'I'm smarter than you' way.
Replace "actually did think" with "thought." "Actually" says "no you're wrong."
Remove "before you even suggested it." Saying you did it first attempts to position yourself as smarter. Adding "even" diminishes it.
Making those changes, you end up with a less insecure, less posturing version, "I thought about integrating it into houseSYSTEM, but I decided that it’s probably best to keep them separated at least for now."
I'm the author (Aaron Greenspan). Funnily enough, Joseph Perla used to be my roommate in Palo Alto. But I had nothing to do with him writing that piece, and I think he later ended up working for Facebook. So maybe his convictions weren't quite so strong.
I republished this in 2012 during the IPO actually and it was quite popular then too. That was right before FB made me an offer I couldn't refuse.
Note that I do believe that FB has changed since 2012 (and I may have helped launch FB Videos which are definitely driving influence and probably make useful ad time) and many people do effectively reach new users with FB ads.
In terms of FB's growth slowing, that is likely given that it has the majority of the world's population online already, and Instagram is growing fast still (and entirely owned by FB).
> fake account problem … Google Trends shows worldwide "Facebook" queries down 80% from their November 2012 peak.
Except that much of this downturn in people googling "Facebook" is explainable by the shift to mobile. Surely no one needs to Google "Facebook" to open the Facebook app on their phone’s home screen. (For that matter, one doesn't even need the app icon when one is receiving push notifications from FB. No legit notifs? No problem, FB will synthesize fake ones.)
Misleading title, weak arguments, no evidence. Just click bait . Facebook saw huge growth since 2012 by acquiring Instagram and monetizing mobile, and also from increased advertising. Facebook does not need more accounts to grow, but rather by making more money from existing users.Terrible article.
At the risk of sounding like a devil's advocate (that isn't my intention), if there really were this much fraud, wouldn't it shake out in the economics? i.e. if you aren't getting your money's worth from the Facebook ads you're buying, wouldn't you notice?
Advertising is an arms race with your competitors, so it is difficult to assign a fixed price to it - you simply need to be spending roughly as much as your competitors are.
Somewhat similarly, on the matter of choosing between alternative advertising platforms, the uncertainties surrounding the quality of their products makes it difficult to choose between them, so people can be inclined to simply go with heuristic measures like a known brand (i.e. Facebook).
If the business' value of success is driven by impressions clicks and likes, they aren't doing it right.
It would be like a development team measuring success by lines of code written - it bears no relationship with the underlying success of the business.
The identification of success/failure should be attributable to revenue or profit. They can have an internal conversion factor from clicks->$$, but it should be there.
It's actually very hard and expensive to do end-to-end reporting, so it's not as simple as you either prove profitability or not. Think of how many SMB's there are out there that have to choose between hiring a new service provider to provide better coverage or spending money on an obscure-to-them tool like a CRM. I feel for them.
In addition, time is always an issue and is the ultimate variable. What worked two months ago didn't work last month, what do you do? Every company runs into this and there are factors that make it crazy complicated: payback period, LTV, AOV, Days to Close.
Ad platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads talk more about "reaching your target customer" with fluffy metrics since that's what they can easily measure and, IMO, it obscures the real end-to-end results you mention. When success is obscured, it allows them to absolve themselves of educating their customers.
The ad platforms build case studies of success and then simplify it down to impressions and reach so that companies feel like they have to do it. It's a profit machine.
If you've ever worked with FB ads, you know that you can directly attribute sales ($ hitting your account) to ad groups ($ leaving your account)
You bid to hit a certain CAC (customer acquisition cost) and to the extent any numbers are inflated, it would just quickly result in a lower bid price per inflated number
... Which isn't a causal estimate of ad effect at all, as most conversions would happen anyway regardless of whether or not the ad was seen. Incremental conversions unfortunately are usually 1 or 2 order of magnitude smaller than raw number of correlationally-attributed conversions. Which makes most incrementality-based ROI numbers of advertising campaigns be negative.
I don't follow. How would the conversion get measured if the user never saw the ad? They'd need to follow a link to a landing page that is associated with that particular campaign, and that registers the conversion after the user performs the desired action, right?
You can run "ghost ads": pretend that you did bid and won an ad auction, log this information, and measure what would have happened in terms of conversions for this counterfactual set of users. Both Google and FB have experimental products to do that, as well as a couple of third party companies. It's very difficult to set up properly, and the ROI numbers don't look good at all which is why big platforms are not super reluctant to offer it broadly, even though it would be a better and more honest way of measuring advertising effectiveness.
Ah, I think I understand. So, you'd measure whether this person made a purchase without ever having viewed the ad. Thanks for explaining.
I can see why platforms would be reluctant to offer this feature. If you're running ads on multiple platforms and only one offers this feature, it will make itself look uniquely bad. However, the other platforms probably also provide little extra value compared to running ads on a single platform.
You can look at your total sales before/after using Facebook ads, or even do A/B testing where you only show Facebook ads to people within a certain region and compare sales with other regions. It's muddy, but possible, and at a certain scale it becomes obvious.
I don't think it really works like that. Most people (and organizations) are likely fine operating under the assumption that because they saw some sales increase, and they invested in Facebook ads, the Facebook ads had something to do with that. And if sales go down, it could be a number of other factors.
Additionally, targeted ads on Facebook or Google are pretty much table stakes in the ad business now. Many (or most) firms probably think it would be silly not to use them.
I was getting a half dozen obviously fake friend requests on IG every day until I set my account to private. These were invariably users like “TatianaXXX6969” or “SexySvetlana1727288”. Seems like the easiest kind of fake account to block (so much for AI and ML). I deleted my FB two years ago and I think IG is next.
Interesting to discover the author is a classmate of Zuckerbro and claims to have invented Facebook. Which seems to have led to a career of writing articles like these.
Excluding the personal attacks, which dilute what would have been a good alternative look at Facebook, I suggest everyone interested in this topic to look at the other parts that make up the click-fraud industry:
- Clickfarms in China that have shady people using some automation and thousands of smartphones to perform fake clicks for the Chinese ad market
- Pied Piper style farms with people in poor countries sitting all day creating accounts (it was exaggerated in the series)
- The ad giants constant "battle" with click-fraud
- Shady tactics used by smaller app/websites to get people to accidentally click on ads
I wouldn't personally denounce all online advertising though. It has its place the same way print media advertising does. It's market-value is questionable though (which is derived from questionable "effectiveness" sales pitches we're told about online advertising)
The author seems to be talking up his portfolio. Although there may be truth to this article, it seems the author is attempting to move the stock price with negitive press.
He keeps referencing total number of user accounts. This is a bad number to track, precisely because of fraud, duplicate, and unused accounts. A better number is something like monthly or daily active users. Then you can randomly sample a subset of these users and manually determine the number of fake accounts to give you a confidence interval on the total number of real daily active users, which for investor/shareholder purposes, is much better to use than total accounts anyway.
I go into more detail in the report I wrote in January, which also points out that the perfectly constant DAU/MAU relationship Facebook reports cannot possibly be true as growth continues to slow/reverse. See https://www.plainsite.org/realitycheck/facebook.html.
Time will tell whether the author, Aaron Greenspan, who knew and interacted with Zuckerberg at Harvard, is right or wrong. Given the lack of good, transparent data, it's hard for me to judge the prevalence of ad fraud. I suspect it's hard for many ad buyers too.
In the meantime, the OP and comments here remind me of the reaction of a media executive, Mel Karmazin, upon realizing, back in 2003, that Google could measure the effectiveness of advertising:
> Karmazin and the networks continued to charge steep rates because, Karmazin says, "advertisers don't know what works and what doesn't. That's a great model." But it's a model, the Google executives told him, that is horribly inefficient. Karmazin, before departing, trained his eyes on his Google hosts and blurted, only half in jest, "You're fucking with the magic!"[a]
Perhaps new media companies like Facebook have come to the realization that they too should not be "fucking with the magic," to use Karmazin's colorful language.
While I do believe that Facebook is indeed lying (about virtually any question you mask it, including user numbers), I think it is meaningful to ask:
"Are advertisers getting enough performance out of Facebook ads to justify the expense?"
The answer could be Yes. It's also possible that many of the companies aren't managing their expenses well, and that they don't know (but still have enough cash, whether from stock market "play money" or VC (SV play money)).
There's no effective answer to the implied question, "How can we stop Facebook from being evil?" Even if the poisonous head of the snake is cut off, there is enough financial interest for remaining executives (and board) to continue along the same general path.
My answer is this: smart startups identify the key value features of Facebook and implement them independently. This is a long play, but it could work.
One example is how Facebook is used for communication and coordination of groups that share common interests. In this example, it's really just a little bit of communication features missing from meetup.com to replace this (and be better than what Facebook offers).
I'm not sure that advertising markets are efficient.
Many people who advertise get a certain gratification in hearing their name (or business name) on the radio. More than one salesperson for newspaper advertising I have talked to tells me that their best line for retaining customers is that "if your newspaper ads disappear people will assume you went out of business." Political campaigns will spend hundreds of millions in election years, enough to drive up the cost of TV advertising for car dealerships, causing a drop in car sales.
Often the audiences for ads are not consumers, but shareholders, politicians, employees, business partners, etc. Why else did IBM and GE run so many "lights on and nobody home" ads before shareholders finally made them stop? Why else do I see so many ads for cable providers that don't do business anywhere near my area? Does this play a role in why mall stores are dying (e.g. they believed their own illusions and didn't realize they were out of touch with consumers?)
When Warren Buffet dies those GEICO ads will be the first thing to go, but they help keep the news media sweet and uncritical of a once superstar investment firm that now burns shareholder dollars while contributing to everything wrong with our economy.
Argument could potentially be interesting save for the fact that the pudding really is in advertiser repeat business. The metrics (of click per ads, fake accounts, what have you), are utterly irrelevant. If advertisers keep coming back for me, Facebook has a viable business. And, until now, that seems to be the case. Maybe there's just tremendous lag in the feedback loop for business to see that there's no value in FB advertising and they'll experience a reckoning down the line, but it's been around FOR A WHILE, and ad revenue is strengthening, not declining.
Again, it's important to disassociate that and the claims that it is a Ponzi scheme and unsustainable business. Both of these things can (and I think probably are) true: Facebook can have a much bigger privacy/fake account problem than it lets on AND also have very real, sustainable revenue from advertising. These things aren't mutually exclusive.
I know people who spend large budgets on Facebook and Google ads. What I hear almost universally is that they aren't effective, yet everyone feels compelled to pay for FB ads and Google ads because they see everyone else doing it. The customers I have spoken too feel that it simply isn't working but they're afraid to stop buying the ads for fear of slipping into online oblivion. Numerous people have shared the same experience with me and nobody is happy. Now there is the chance that I just happen to know only statistical outliers, the people who pay a lot of money and feel they aren't getting anything in return but feel compelled to continue. Maybe I just happen to know a dozen or so very unlucky resentful people. I don't have solid "evidence". It's all anecdotal. That said, this experience I've just described is most likely common and hardly unique.
>In other words, Facebook is growing the fastest in the locations worldwide where one finds the most fraud. In other other words, Facebook isn’t growing anymore at all—it’s shrinking.
Look I hate Facebook as much as the next guy but this is clearly specious logic. The existence of fraudulent accounts does not preclude growth in new accounts.
My naive question here re: fake accounts + advertisers is why should I care? If these big corporations want to blow their money shouting about gay scuba diving into the ether, what's the harm?
For those out of the loop and feel like this essay feels a bit “bitter,” Aaron Greenspan, the article’s author claims that he invented the idea behing Facebook back in 2003.
I hear this all the time, but every time I ask for the data (I have actually asked people whose job is to do marketing for businesses) I'm told "just trust me."
I am not saying they are lying, it would be truly surprising to believe such an elaborate house of cards could stand for so long. But I am asking for evidence.
People lie to keep their jobs all the time. They might also just not know, but because it's standard practice to use Facebook for advertising they just do it and say it's a necessity.
What reason do they have to obfuscate the data unless the data shows something they don't want you to see?
I've asked people at companies I work for. I've asked people at companies I've invested in. So in those cases, I already signed all the legal documents and NDAs.
I've also asked people who did it for companies after they shut down. The only thing that's obvious is nobody wants to share the data. I suspect it's because the data is not as positive as we're supposed to believe.
I am not saying I'm entitled to it (although I think it should be available for an investor upon request), I'm saying the widespread refusal to share the evidence is a yellow flag that something is wrong.
I mean, it's possible, but I'm trying to say that I would expect every such request to be refused to a regular employee regardless of whether something is wrong or not.
That doesn't explain the scenario where the company is shut down or I'm an investor.
My question to you is: why would you ever trust a claim without evidence (especially when the people making that claim stand to personally profit from it)?
The investor case -- I mean, it depends on how much of an investor you were, and what the relevant rules are. But if anybody could become an investor in the company, then it's obviously not a real barrier... giving it to every investor would be like giving it to everyone, which they obviously wouldn't want to do.
The shut-down case: well, maybe you feel they don't have a reason not to tell you internal info for a dead company, but the general hesitation would still be there, and I don't see what they would gain from it either. Hardly seems like evidence for hiding information.
> My question to you is: why would you ever trust a claim without evidence (especially when the people making that claim stand to personally profit from it)?
"Ever"? I mean, it's a case-by-case thing. I might do it if the evidence isn't available to me, and the opposite might imply believing there's a large-scale conspiracy to lie. Or I might not. The lack of someone telling an outsider internal information is not really strong evidence either way.
That is some massive reification for fake accounts - just because they are named the same doesn't mean they are similiar.
There is a massive difference between "letting people create accounts for their pets, spammers put up fake accounts" and "fake financial accounts out of whole cloth to create false profits".
Whatever one thinks of the article or its case, this is an interesting thread. I've turned off the flags on it and, because some people were presumably flagging because of the baity title, replaced that with a representative phrase from the article.
Second: it's not like investors are somehow unaware that FB cannot grow forever. In 2013 the PE ratio was more than 120, and it is now 30. That is investors adjusting their expectations about future growth.
the same kind of accusation was poisonning google ads for a long time but it was called click fraud. numerous customers were suing google over billing them for fake clicks. Ultimately, google proved to be better than other sources of online advertising regarding fraud detection, and so people continued to buy ads.
The problem is the same for facebook. Major advertiser track clicks up to purchases over months , sometimes years. So they are perfectly aware of which users are bogus, which impression are actually never seen, etc.
Ultimately the only thing that counts is whether the investment is worth it.
Do you think the market actually looks for users growth on facebook.com that much, now that it has passed the billion mark, has proved to be profitable with ads, and is making a huge chunk of its latest growth using other sites and apps (mainly instagram and whatsapp) ?
I wouldn’t say fb is totally pure, but hyping number is i think the general rule with companies whether they are public or private. That’s why we have analysts, notation agencies, and why stock exchange requires publishing hard facts, which analysts can cross and match with high scrutiny.
I don't have a clear opinion on the topic you wrote about (it's fascinating, but it's also controversial, and I would need to spend much more time reading many other details, to be able to have an informed, strong opinion), but if you are so convinced that this is securities fraud, wouldn't suing Facebook be an option? Have you considered it?
I always log in and out of FB on a computer in one browser type and don't have it on any phones. One thing that always strikes me as odd:
Click your picture or add an account, and
Add account
and in big type: Create a new account. It's free and always will be
(un etc fields, birthdate)
The whole front page is set up to encourage multiple accounts and presumably easy to automate the creation of thousands of fake accounts, which as we know is very prevalent.
Great hard hitting article Aaron.
Many stock camera apps access Facebook on startup. Even if you aren't logged in I wouldn't doubt that FB can gather enough data to correlate your account to the phone.
I advertise on Facebook and I have no idea what the Facebook user growth numbers are - and I don't care. We advertise on Facebook because it works. We pay money to Facebook and acquire new users for our product in return.
Facebook actually under-reports the ROI for us (we acquire 2x more customers through Facebook ads than Facebook says we do), because ad blockers block the Facebook tracking pixel.
The president is vocally anti-free press, constantly making false claims about immigrants, telling members of congress who are native citizens to "go back where they came from", vacationing more than any other prior president, and has failed to condemn white nationalism within his base.
There's plenty of facist behavior going on in this administration.
About the only thing you've listed that could possibly be construed as being fascist is being vocally anti-free press, and he's done almost nothing to hinder the press beyond tweeting about them. Making false claims about immigrants does not make anyone a fascist. Telling people to go back to their country of origin does not make anyone a fascist. Vacationing does not make someone a fascist. Failing to condemn white nationalism, or even being a white nationalist, does not make anyone a fascist.
Racism and prejudice have been hallmark behaviors of fascist regimes throughout history. Fascism itself relies on prejudice to create the in-group and the "others". In fact, historians don't even fully agree on what exactly fascism encompasses. We can't simply argue that there's some taxonomy of hate with clear boundaries when it comes to fascism. It's taken many forms throughout history.
Racism was inherent to the Nazi movement as we all know, it's impossible to separate their racist behavior from the rest of their "standard" fascist behavior. The two were deeply linked. The fascist movement in Italy wasn't considered racially-driven, but still relied heavily forms of prejudice to create a society tolerant of fascism.
You're essentially arguing that racist and prejudicial behavior, while abhorrent, can't be universally linked with fascism, while history has shown a strong relationship between them. Of course, we can't truly know whether the actions I've listed above constitute to a fascist movement until we actually see a populist takeover. In that regard, I truly hope that I'm wrong.
Yes, there may be a correlation between racism and fascism but unfortunately racism and institutional racism also exist with many other forms of government. That's one of the reasons you shouldn't use it as an example of fascism.
There has been no push or attempted justification for single party politics, no centralization of power unique to this president, no signs of a complete unwillingness to trade (in fact, there's a strong willingness to be interdependent as long as we 'win')
Almost none of the other main signs of fascism are there. That said, it's entirely possible that they will appear in the future. Until that point, however, I'm reluctant to call this proto-fascism.
> There has been no push or attempted justification for single party politics
He's vocally questioned if the democrats are "traitors" during public speeches[0], a wild accusation even for US political discourse.
> no centralization of power unique to this president
Today, he proclaimed in a speech that Article 2 of the US constitution gives him the right to do whatever he wants[1]. He's spent much of his administration embroiled in scandals involving demanding loyalty from subordinates, and has been repudiated by members of his own party for acting beyond the bounds of his authority.
> no signs of a complete unwillingness to trade
He started a massive trade war to protest the current trade situation with some of the largest players in the global economy. Sure, it's not state capitalism, but his trade strategy directly contradicts both major parties' philosophies regarding trade and is often subject to authoritarian rhetoric.
Sure, this administration doesn't meet all of the classical definitions of what past fascist regimes have looked like.
He may not be making a ton of concrete progress towards consolidating power, but he makes it very clear that he sees himself as having far more power than he actually does, and often gets frustrated when he isn't able to accomplish what he wants. He clearly hates our system of government and isn't afraid to question many of the basic tenets of our democracy.
>He's vocally questioned if the democrats are "traitors" during public speeches[0], a wild accusation even for US political discourse.
Spare me. How many people have said he should be investigated for being a Russian plant? Every one of those people is questioning if his loyalty is with Russia, or in other words if he is a traitor.
>Today, he proclaimed in a speech that Article 2 of the US constitution gives him the right to do whatever he wants[1]
You are interpreting his remarks as uncharitably as possible. He's not claiming he has absolute power, he's claiming that he can do whatever he wants to do that the president has the authority to do without asking anyone else first. There is nothing in Article 2 saying the president needs to get permission from someone else before exercising the powers vested in him. That's all he's saying. The context is that he's saying he could have fired Mueller if he wanted to, without asking anyone for permission.
>He may not be making a ton of concrete progress towards consolidating power, but he makes it very clear that he sees himself as having far more power than he actually does, and often gets frustrated when he isn't able to accomplish what he wants.
The problem is that this describes most Presidents, especially the last 5. Obama ordered assassinations of Americans overseas without trial, had two intelligence heads perjure themselves before Congress with no consequences and re categorized every male over 15 as an enemy combatant. Bush went to war unilaterally and had people perjure themselves before Congress with no consequences. Clinton bombed other countries and manipulated his personal political power better than anyone in 60 years. Reagan destabilized a dozen countries without congressional approval.
Every one of them went far beyond their stated powers and made it clear they they saw themselves as having every right to do so.
I know, right! I mean, concentration camps, repeated claims that the head of state cannot do anything illegal and is above the law because he can pardon himself, repeated claims it should be illegal to criticise the head of state, repeated threats to shut down major media outlets for criticizing the head of state, and more recently a claim that the head of state should never be removed from office?
That doesn't sound like fascism to me at all. Perfectly good old traditional democracy in action if you ask me.
That sounds like an attempt at dictatorship or monarchy but not necessarily fascism. There's no strength through unity arguments, no pushing to seize economic power through state instruments and in general no consolidation of power in the executive branch.
I get that you might want to call the guy a nazi because he's racist, but that doesn't make him a fascist.
I think it's really interesting that you just stopped reading the moment the article challenged your existing political beliefs.
That was very close-minded of you to abandon the article the very moment it forced you to think outside of the narrow box you're used to thinking in.
And for the record, Trump is bringing Fascism to America, Social Media is helping his cause to do so, and Mark Zuckerberg personally plans to profit from it if he can.
If that reality bothers you, it should, because, again: Fascism is on the rise in America...
Or it could be that you just don't like your political views referred to as "fascism", but if you share Trump's political views, they are demonstrably fascist views, and therefore it is literally fascism.
If you don't like fascism, stop making excuses for it. If you do like fascism, stop complaining that people judge you for it - you deserve the judgement.
Or, possibly, one could object to threat inflation and using words to mean whatever you want them to mean, rather than the commonly accepted definitions.
There's enough bad in what Trump says (not as much in what he manages to do, and so far at least his foreign policy is... not great, but better than the dumpster fire that other candidate oversaw).
"...a role in putting a fascist, white supremacist in the White House"
It's a petulant and a false statement on so many levels. The president is neither a fascist nor a racist. And anyone claiming someone is such should be willing to provide a careful definition of these terms along with unambiguous examples of committed actions pursuant to such definitions.
I suppose you and I have very different definitions of racism, but I'm not seeing it in anything you've provided. Countries of origin and religion are not race.
And, to me, racism is harmful actions or words motivated by a hatred of or a belief in the superiority over a race by a member of another race.
“Racism” encompasses bigotry by ethnicity (which encompasses national origin), not merely that based on the 3 classical races (Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid.) In fact, “race”, as commonly used, encompasses ethnic identity groups that are not classical races, too.
Plus there are plenty of examples of Trump being racist in the narrow classical sense, but if your best defense against the charge of racism is that he’s really just a bigot in a number of dimensions that aren't technically “racial”, well, that says quite a lot on its own.
Here's a direct quote (from my link) - what would you say this indicates besides racism by your definition?
“Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Trump at first denied the remarks, but later said in a 1997 Playboy interview that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”
Looks like hearsay to me, but if he made that remark, it was a stupid thing to say. While there is no wider context, the remark itself still doesn't indicate that he hates black people.
Sure. Remember https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20004467 ? Same sort of situation. At some point, you may have to confront reality. OP claims, quite reasonably, that Zuckerberg contributes to fascism in the USA, genocide in Myanmar, and other regrettable political movements around the world.
FB may contribute to fascism in every corner of the universe, but the author specifically said the US president is a fascist. That's a patently absurd statement. And that's why I balled up the article and threw it away.
But "white supremacist", when you consider the people in his circle (including his family) is an odd description, like when people call Ben Shapiro a Nazi.
Very few of the people who talk about "fascism" have coherent ideologies either. Trump isn't decisive enough to be a fascist. He really only knows how to do a few things well, and together those don't amount to much more than "play the news media like a fiddle". If we actually wanted USA to be less fascist, we could start by violently invading fewer nations who've done nothing to provoke invasion.
Sheryl Sandberg hasn't been thrown overboard because if she is thrown overboard she might talk.
Mark Zuckerberg won't allow the appointment of an independent Chairman of the Board because one thing about people who run Ponzi scams is that they try to keep as small a circle of people as possible in control so that news won't leak out.
> So what is that magical ingredient, that secret sauce, that “genius” trade secret, that turned an over-funded money-losing startup into one of America’s greatest business success stories?
False. Facebook made $50M in profit the year before it took its Series A. It has always been a profitable company[0].
> According to the S-1, Facebook made a modest $382,000 in revenue 2004, $9 million in revenue in 2005, $48 million in revenue in 2006 and $153 million in revenue in 2007, with no reporting of net loss.[0]
Seems like we're both wrong. FB was profitable before '09, but it did have a couple years of loss.
No sure where the journalist (Alexia Tsotsis) got the data to write: "$382,000 in revenue 2004, $9 million in revenue in 2005, $48 million in revenue in 2006 and $153 million in revenue in 2007, with no reporting of net loss."
Some embarrassingly very ignorant statements here by Greenspan.
> a company that was out of users in 2012 managed to find a wellspring of nearly infinite and sustained growth that has lasted it, so far, half of the way through 2019. So what is that magical ingredient, that secret sauce, that “genius” trade secret, that turned an over-funded money-losing startup into one of America’s greatest business success stories?
Facebook has been wildly profitable since approximately the end of 2008. Five years after its founding, in 2009 - long before Greenspan's setup premise - they turned a $229m profit on $777m in sales. For fiscal 2011 that was a billion in profit. Any start-up in world history would be envious of that extreme profitability so early into existence.
In terms of millions of daily active users or users in general, Facebook wasn't suffering in terms of growth in 2012 or 2013. Greenspan is flat-out lying here. They went from 483 million daily active users at the end of 2011, to 665 million at the end of 1Q13. They added 135m daily actives in 2012, 28% DAU growth after eight or nine years. A strong number given their immense size at that point.
Actually, advertisers already know there are lots of fake (Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat) accounts. Likewise, advertisers also know that newspaper & magazine circulation numbers are inflated (even though the circulation #s are "audited"). Ad buyers also know that tv audience sizes are inflated as well.
What matters in the end is if there's a positive ROI on the ad spending. The advertisers can measure the uptick on sales and if the ads worked, they renew their ad spend on Facebook. The majority of Facebook revenues come from repeat business of advertisers who already know about fake users. In contrast, if the majority of Facebook revenue were to come from 1st time ad buyers that were easily fooled by fake accounts, that's when the false user count would drastically affect revenue.
I'm the last person to defend Facebook but just wanted to highlight how advertisers think. For the Facebook ponzi scheme to fall apart, the ads have to stop working. This has happened before. In the 1990s, advertisers were buying Yahoo banner ads. But after the initial novelty of naive web surfers clicking on them, advertisers quickly realized banner ads were worthless. As a result, Yahoo revenues plunged.