Facebook is selling invisible ad impressions

Facebook is selling invisible ad impressions(blog.sefsar.com)

9 points by youssefsarhan 13 years ago | 6 comments

chewxy 13 years ago |

In Display advertising this is common. The fact that tools like Adxpose exist points that this is a common problem for advertisers. Very often the impressions are sold anyway.

Heck, C3Metrics has even come out with a new product - Viewable Impressions solely to address this issue.

Is this a problem? Yes and no. I think ad spaces should always be sold. But I think there should be a price difference between impression loaded and impression viewed.

seannicholls 13 years ago | |

I'd like to know under what circumstances you think that a company or individual should, or would, pay for advertising which is not (by definition) used?

even if it were at a different price, why would anyone pay for advertising, knowing full well that it would not be viewed?

chewxy 13 years ago | | |

Simple. Pages with long content under the fold. Most of the ad tags are called with page load, and there will be many situations where the ads will be served but not seen. The situation cannot be helped.

In case you're wondering about asynchronous ad-loading, i.e only load an ad when the tag scrolls into the viewport, no that is not a viable option because the world out there is crazily varied, and not everyone uses the latest nightly build of Chromium. There are a lot of bad javascript engines out there, so I wouldn't jump to assume that async loading of ads would work across the board. Trust me I've worked on this problem before.

As for why different pricing would work: what I had meant was billing post-facto.

So for example, you may have an IO saying you're buying 300k imps per day at $1 CPM viewed and $0.1 unviewed. At the end of the day you may have 150k viewed and 150k unviewed. You only pay $165 instead of $300

EDIT: I have bad arithmetics for an asian person

youssefsarhan 13 years ago | |

That doesn't sound right. Advertisements should not be charged for if they are not visible. Advertising online is horrendously bad, and this is just one of the problems with it.

taligent 13 years ago |

This really takes the cake for one of the dumbest posts I've seen for a while.

What exactly are you expecting Facebook to do: hide content and just show ads ? And how is this anyway different from Google's Search page or almost every website with advertising for that matter.

youssefsarhan 13 years ago | |

Hide content and just show ads? What? Who ever suggested anything like that? If other sites are doing this, then they're messing up too. So I've no idea what are you talking about.

They are loading ad impressions that aren't visible. That's a major problem, because it's preventable. Why don't they track scroll –which I'm sure they do already– and load ads accordingly. Their only defense would be that they load the ads, but don't charge for them unless the user scrolls.