> Millions of auctions take place every minute as users across Facebook load their feeds. ... The algorithm is constantly learning, using past results to inform how it weighs bids in the next auction. The intent, Facebook says, is to maximize value for everybody: to pair the advertiser with its likeliest customers, and to show ads that users want to see. And, of course, to make money for Facebook. [emphasis mine]
So FB wants:
1. advertisers to be successful so that they come back and attract others;
2. users to remain sticky and not be turned off or too distracted by an ad; and
3. sell each ad space at the highest price, so long as 1 and 2 remain true.
Interesting business they're in and an incredibly challenging (and fun/rewarding) algorithm to code.
I still wish I were doing something that actually bettered the world, but I have bills to pay.
Then again, maybe ensuring people graduate in debt is a great way to ensure we as a society do what folks with cash want us to instead of what we feel we ought to be doing.
There's not too much spam in it.
And, users are still very much annoyed by distracting, irrelevant, or overly-targeted ads.
Agree that we need to improve the quality of ads across the board.
So they're really pairing the ads with people who are least likely to complain. That kind of shifts how I view the incentives.
How would you know, if only users who are actually annoyed are vocal about this?
I, for once, mostly see ads from the companies which I am already a happy and enthusiast customer of, for new versions of products that I enjoy. I even follow the industry news to know about new versions of these products and their reviews - and when I can't buy them, I genuinly enjoy watching youtube reviews about these products.
Do you honestly think that a person like me would be annoyed by these advertisements?
Don't you think that a _lot_ of people can say the same about their own product category that they're enthusiastic about? In my case, it's music software and hardware, but it could be cars, power tools, clothing or some other hobby that people enjoy spending their money on.
Sorry for the rant - I'm just tired of seeing the notion about how bad and annoying the ads are, when I see zero confirmation of this in my reality.
And make no mistake that business intelligence is absolutely one of the most important things a big company (or nation) can have from a defensibly perspective.
Speaking as a former spy it's a spy agency's dream to have the kind of data on possible competitors and collaborators that these groups have. Individually they can see every threat coming a mile away and then decide to ignore, buy, invest.
This is why I think "this time is different" from a disruption cycle perspective. Never in history have companies had so much intelligence on their competitors and collaborators and actively used it to disrupt themselves - multiple times. Don't get me wrong, companies have always done this, but never at this level of granularity and specificity so quickly.
...and then decide to ignore, buy, invest or copy.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1789358
And that's just the basic principle. Given that Mastodon does not attempt to mess with people's feeds using clever algorithms, instead accepting that when people follow someone they want to see those posts in chronological order, it should be even more attractive to companies used to facebook hiding their posts from their own fans unless they pay up.
[1]: https://medium.com/@Gargron/two-reasons-why-organizations-sh... [2]: https://joinmastodon.org/
SEO is pretty much the same thing in my opinion.
Another type of YouTube video that is taking advantage of youtube blocking/copyrights are happening.
Basically these are YouTube videos that are about current events, content or blocked content with a robotic voice or music that describes the event with a series of photos, text, news and sometimes video clips.
Basically anything that is blocked from youtube, the algorithms post these robotic news videos that drone on that are algorithmically generated on any small news event that may fit this gap.
Lots of events like terror attacks, shootings, sports clips that have been removed, etc will flood in as soon as other content is blocked or removed or copyrighted and youtube can't have real videos about it.
This happened frequently after the Vegas shooting and other major events.
It also happens all the time to NFL content. For instance I was looking for Pierre Garcon's injury on youtube to see how serious it was, here's the type of fluff you will find (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1hZibQCdR8 & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI1CN0uDu-w & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2cJqaE4Em4 as an example and there are thousands of just Pierre Garcon's injury) because nfl videos are blocked immediately. If you search in google "pierre garcon injury youtube" you will get nothing but these videos.
A few years ago I spent more than $4000 on Facebook to build up about 4000 fans for a karaoke venue I ran at the time. I'd put some news out, and reach most of the fans. Then Facebook told me that to reach all of my fans I would now have to "boost" my posts, while the company simultaneously cut the organic reach to the fans I had paid them for.
They used the excuse that "people have to much stuff on their feed" but we all know that is BS. If I had known they would have done that I would never have bothered in the first place. Why help a company build its audience for you to be treated poorly? I suspect many many small business people feel that same way, and will abandon Facebook as soon as a less greedy alternative comes along.
It's really not BS. People's feeds are flooded with content from tons of sources.
Why would posts from company that I've 'liked' get guaranteed display when family/friends/friends-of-friends don't get that treatment. Moreover what if I've 'liked' 100+ bands/restaurants/celebrities/businesses/news-sources, they can easily produce enough posts each day that I would never scroll far enough see all of it, nor would I want to.
The thing you want already exists and is called a newsletter.
By sticking around on Facebook waiting for this to happen, you're also contributing to it not happening.
FB ads is definitely improvement in terms of the time spent and approachability, cost on the other hand depends on how effective your marketing is so its definitely more variable.
Does anyone know how this works?
And: "A new Facebook API, called the Offline Conversions API, works with a number of in-store sales systems from companies like Square and IBM to match their customer data with Facebook’s advertising data." [2]
(More science-fictiony: they could broadcast a local audio signal that fingerprints a particular location. Hmm, startup idea.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
This appears to be non-news:
I guess the tough part is getting the users on to another platform. Businesses will then naturally follow, but convincing the users to switch when they and everyone they know are entrenched in FB is hard to say the least.
For smaller features / ideas, it's much less risky to copy than to buy a company (for, say, 10-100M) and hope the acquisition goes well. Most acquisitions don't go all that well.
Its even worse in big traditional firms took me 3 years at a major publisher to get a simple dns redirect done
https://www.wired.com/2016/11/block-ultrasonic-signals-didnt...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-th...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/your-...
Edit: When you say you know lots of "marketers and advertisers" that are making money from ads, are you referring to resellers and providers of ad inventory and/or analytics, or are you referring to people who actually sell goods and services other than marketing and advertising inventory?
net present average customer lifetime value acquired per unit of advertising cost
If it's over unity, you're making money with advertising, if it's not, you're wasting money on advertising or need to increase your CLTV or decrease your discount rate.
You put a cookie on their machine when they hit your website, tracking where they came from, and exactly how much you paid for that visit (because FB will give you which cohort they came from).
Then you track that to a sale, and you can determine how much you made from them.
If it is a single sale, then that's basically it (obviously you track return visitors and amortize the cost of them against that too).
If it is a SAAS, then customer value calculation is a little more complicated (you record how long people stay with you etc).
Most ecommerce platforms or marketing platforms have this setup with a click of a button. Here's a link to KissMetric's page on this: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/customer-acquisition-cost/
A16Z included this on their metrics post: https://a16z.com/2015/08/21/16-metrics/
What difference does it make? If it’s profitable, it’s profitable.
> And are you able to demonstrate definitively that a visitor from FB concluded a sale? If so, how?
Through the variety of existing measurement solutions, or a custom solution.
Twitter: https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-measurement-an...
Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel/pixel-wi...
Google: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722054?hl=en
I don’t understand why you seem to think that companies are throwing tens of billions of dollars a year at Facebook (and Google, and Twitter) with not only no returns but also no ability to measure that lack of returns. It’s just such a ridiculous viewpoint to hold.
For some extremely simplistic e-commerce conversions, such as for referrals to SaaS, it is easy to measure. For entire swathes of consumer products, the game is brand recognition and other soft metrics that drive huge ad spends. You can pretend it’s a science, but the incentives are all upside down for a true end-to-end ROI determination.
The other half of the promise is that you can target exactly the 'right' people. And this seems sketchier to me, as the article kinda gets at: as targeting complexity increases, it's harder to tell whether problems are arising due to market fit or issues in the targeting algorithms. In the old world, you bought ads on content, and now you buy ads on eyeballs: my guess is that there's an unexplored happy medium between the two.
It's trivial easy to add a tracking id to this (in-fact I think it is on by default)
And are you able to demonstrate definitively that a visitor from FB concluded a sale? If so, how?
I think people are a little confused about if you are trolling or you genuinely don't know.
Anyway, https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-pixel/pixel-wi... (and plenty of other methods)
It's really, really easy. And that is why Facebook and Google are printing money - vendors know it works and can measure exactly how well, so they throw money at them.
There's hard, direct evidence involved in every step of the way.