[HN Gopher] After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off
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After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off
Author : CPLX
Score : 299 points
Date : 2021-01-04 15:48 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jordan-shared.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jordan-shared.medium.com)
| chimen wrote:
| Boy that "Emma C" author sure knows everything about anything.
| This is the lowest form of shallow content that receives millions
| of dollars to be in front, surpassing good stories by authors
| with notoriety on the subject.
|
| Facebook is the place where some of my "acquaintances" learned
| that Bill Gates gives them COVID, that everything is a conspiracy
| designed to take something from them, that the vaccine will
| implant them nano-chips or 5G "reactions" and sleeper nano-
| whatever that will wake-up on the right frequency.
|
| I hate that platform because it gives a big mouth to everyone, to
| the bad apple that can now infect the rest over the internet. One
| look at shared.com homepage and I knew...I couldn't be bothered
| with their story.
| smoyer wrote:
| > Facebook has systematically shut down our 2 small businesses
| during a pandemic and economic crisis without explanation.
|
| If you've spent $57MM on Facebook ads, are you still considered a
| "small business"? Perhaps I'm out of touch. I think the warning
| about building your business on someone else's land still applies
| but I'm not sure how you get around that when so much of the
| world's attention is controlled by a few truly giant companies.
| tgv wrote:
| The term was probably used to garner sympathy. "We, poor, small
| business owners, in the process of extracting the last bit of
| your muddled brain's attention, ..."
|
| But I'm sure they wouldn't have spent $57M if they hadn't
| extracted more than that from other advertising parties.
| __s wrote:
| > I think the warning about building your business on someone
| else's land
|
| There aren't really any businesses which have sovereign
| territory
| smoyer wrote:
| That's an interesting position (and I'm not disputing it) but
| if you were a business that has sovereign territory, you
| still need utilities (Internet).
|
| Penn State has its own data-centers, is part of the Internet2
| consortium and has dedicated fiber to both AWS and Azure but
| you're still ultimately reliant on those you're leasing the
| connections from - even if you own the fiber, you're probably
| leasing the right-of-way/poles/etc.
|
| So ... how do we build an Internet that's fully inter-
| connected but can withstand actions by the few relatively
| large carriers? Thinking about it a bit more, isn't the
| effect of having a few large network providers analogous to
| the issue with BitCoin having a few large mining operations
| in effective control of the ecosystem?
| toast0 wrote:
| Carrier's ability to influence has everything to do with
| their duopoloy on the last mile to the eyeballs.
|
| If you're in the position to lease a connection to an
| internet exchange, you've got tons of options for transit
| from there. And leasing fiber is generally a matter of
| location and cost, not content; I don't know if it's
| strictly common carrier, but it might be.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Satellite fleets?
| smoyer wrote:
| Which could theoretically be done today but then you'd be
| a tenant of Musk. I really think the idea of mesh
| networks is great for neighborhoods but can it be
| extended to a global-scale network (well ... continent
| scale until there's a personal communication mechanism
| that will cross oceans)?
|
| EDIT: This was posted on today's "Who is hiring?" thread
| - not really p2p Internet but ...
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25633106
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I imagine there are no upper bounds to the growth of
| satellite communication capabilities other than physical
| limits. Extrapolating a few decades at current growth
| rates out the network be enormous.
| jki275 wrote:
| You can theoretically run a very low bandwidth set of
| links over any radio technology, including HF which will
| give you that long range connectivity.
|
| Problem is, people expect streaming video on their
| smartphones. You can't do that over low bandwidth over
| the horizon links.
|
| Continent scale? Depends on the continent. No way to do
| that in the Americas, there's just too much open space.
| You could do it in many cities I do think.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| Aren't countries a business?
| dspillett wrote:
| On a single someone else's land then?
|
| Going multi-platform from the start is probably not the way
| to go as you are adding complication before you have the
| basics rounded out, but once you are spending that much on
| advertising you presumably have a sizable turn-over and
| should have long ago looked at diversifying to deal with
| situations like this which (even if temporary) could kill the
| business model.
|
| Of course if FB is truly the only game in town for your
| target audience, you have a problem there...
| ffhhj wrote:
| > There aren't really any businesses which have sovereign
| territory
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_City
| saotome wrote:
| touche
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Funnily enough, I worked for a company that sold software to
| casinos, many of which very much exist on sovereign tribal
| land, where they're often the single major business entity.
|
| It led to some quirkiness: we had to disavow ourselves of
| almost all cloud services. They wanted all the software and
| data on-prem because they didn't want anything on U.S. soil.
| cookingmyserver wrote:
| I think that it could be considered a small business, but on
| the upper side probably. Their ads are the supplies they use to
| make their product. It works out to 4 million a year, although
| I doubt they were spending anywhere near that much starting off
| (which is why I think they could be past the point of the
| public's perception of a small business).
|
| It would be like looking at how much a small business
| fabricator spent on metal and other supplies. That number is
| going to be larger than what they actually bring in as profit.
| If ads aren't your supplies then it would absolutely be an
| indication of being a large business if you spent $57 million
| on marketing.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > If you've spent $57MM on Facebook ads, are you still
| considered a "small business"?
|
| My thoughts exactly. Not necessarily agreeing with FB's act
| here, but this post and the way they connect their issue to a
| hot topic these days (small businesses) seems hypocritical and
| an attempt to make people sympathize with them. That's not
| what's happening here. They should instead talk about the
| entirety of their business (all their pages, not just a
| handful) and then claim it is a small business.
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| The US Government, specifically the SBA, defines a small
| business as any business with fewer than 1,500 employees and
| less than $38.5 million in average annual receipts.
|
| I was surprised by this definition too.
| 542458 wrote:
| Hunh, I would have thought it would be "or". I'm surprised as
| well!
| smarx007 wrote:
| That sounds a bit strange, I would count any business with
| more than employees to be "medium" and 1000 to be large.
| Think of coffee shops: 1500 people allows you to have a
| network across multiple cities.
|
| But w.r.t. the amounts of money, they spent $57MM over 15
| years, so it's $4MM/y using very rough math.
|
| Upd: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/files/Size_Stand
| ards... says on p. 29 that it's less than $27.5MM or 1000
| people, so you are right, it's quite a high bar.
|
| Upd2: EU caps small businesses at 50 people and medium at
| 250, which sounds much more reasonable to me https://www.ucl.
| ac.uk/procurement/suppliers/smes#:~:text=Def....
| kelchqvjpnfasjl wrote:
| I don't think that is $57MM in one year. I think that is over
| the lifetime of the business.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Another sign that several FAANGs exist as a monopoly. When you're
| so big that you can provide effectively no customer service to a
| customer spending in the 10s of millions (and they have no
| competitor they can go to afterwards) there's a problem.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Facebook and google are not the only places to advertise.
| minitoar wrote:
| Sorta. Where else would you advertise if you're specifically
| trying to reach people who are doing web searches for your
| product category?
| petercooper wrote:
| To be fair, ads on Facebook aren't generally appearing in
| response to searches. But there are plenty of high value
| lower traffic options, such as specialized blogs and
| newsletters that have audiences fitting your target market
| - you have to work to find and work with them but at a
| certain scale it makes sense (at "I have $57m to spend on
| ads" scale, potentially not).
| simplecto wrote:
| Please enlighten us. Porn networks do not count.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| I haven't spent a dime on online ads, but if it were my
| problem, I'd go though the top Alexa websites and see if
| they accept money for ads.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The days of that kind of thing are over. Everyone does
| placements using ad networks.
|
| Best you'll manage along those lines is approaching
| celebrities and youtube/insta stars and getting them to
| endorse your product.
| underdown wrote:
| This is typically what companies spending 57m on ads do.
| Its less expensive per click/impression as fb/Google
| don't take a cut. More expensive to manage.
| theflyinghorse wrote:
| what do you have in mind other than Facebook and Google as
| online advertising (actually any advertising) that has the
| same reach?
| missedthecue wrote:
| believe it or not, advertising existed before 2010.
| craftinator wrote:
| It did, and it still does. The biggest difference is that
| now, FB and Google and a few others have a scope that is
| an order of magnitude larger than all other advertisers
| combined. They've gained almost total market control over
| advertising, hence the word monopoly.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| and then there was a massive revolution in the way that
| people consumed content, and now FB and Google account
| for the vast majority of advertising consumption (not
| spending: consumption)
| JosephRedfern wrote:
| Believe it or not, people used to physically borrow
| movies from shops and return them 2 days later!!! That
| doesn't mean that I can still walk to my newsagents and
| borrow a copy of Pulp Fiction on VHS.
|
| Things change, and Facebook and Google are now the big
| players in online advertising, accounting for a large
| majority of the ad market. Other platforms exist, of
| course, but by cutting out Google Ads and Facebook you're
| going to be targetting a very different user base and are
| cutting out a significant share of the market.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Online Facebook + Google take something like 50% of all
| ad revenue. Since the product being advertised is a
| website, offline advertising is probably a lot less
| effective than online.
| xiwenc wrote:
| I'm curious why the author didn't take this to court?
|
| Perhaps it can evolve into a class action lawsuit. That would
| teach FB and other FAANGs.
| gpm wrote:
| To court... for what? Choosing not to do business with the
| author? That's not illegal. That doesn't become illegal just
| because they've done quite a bit of business in the past.
| logronoide wrote:
| The author is fully dependent from FB. He cannot bite the
| hand that feeds him. I think it's a smart move to reach the
| front page of HN before taking this to court.
| ben_w wrote:
| If he's been kicked off their network, does he have
| anything to lose by biting the hand that used to feed him?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The cost of lawyers is >0 and the chance of winning is 0.
| Better to take whatever cash you have and walk away than
| sue.
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| I think the idea is that they might be more likely to
| reverse the discussion in response to a forum discussion
| than to being served legal papers.
| slumdev wrote:
| Whining at the right people has a nonzero chance of
| getting him back on Facebook.
|
| Lawyering up has zero chance.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| I agree with you. When the issue of Apple's anti-competitive
| behaviour comes up on HN, it is always rebuffed by saying Apple
| does not have a monopoly--its US share of smartphone market is
| merely 40%. This is demonstration that you don't need a 100%
| market share to act anti-competitively. Facebook and Google
| each have less than 30% market share in ad spend in the US.
| absolutelyrad wrote:
| The fact that 30% app store tax exists and both stores (App
| Store by Apple and Google Play Store) have somewhat similar
| strategies highly indicate collusion going on. Apple only
| changed it for people making under $1m a year after people
| got mad and they got sued by Epic Games or they knew Epic
| Games was coming for their asses. But they know that majority
| of their revenue comes from pubs making over $1m a year which
| they still tax at 30%.
|
| Then the fact that they hold Safari backwards to cripple the
| adoption of PWA's (Modern Web Apps). They don't allow real
| competitors to Safari either. The competitors that exist like
| Chrome or Firefox are just Safari under the hood on iOS.
|
| iOS and Apple have single handedly crippled the innovation on
| mobile web. Safari is the modern Internet Explorer but Apple
| forcing people to use it directly or indirectly and not
| allowing real competition on iOS.
|
| This is straight up anti trust material and they should face
| scrutiny for it. Sleepy lawmakers should wake up.
|
| Not only does it harm American businesses, but also
| businesses across the world.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Perhaps you would also consider book publishers as
| colluding since they too have a "tax" to publish books.
|
| Even with ePubs book publishers are likely to take 50--75%.
| Print books the publishers still take 85% and higher.
|
| Now _that_ is a tax. But I would not call it collusion.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Even if Apple shouldn't be subject to an anti- _trust_
| suit, I think the whole industry should be regulated to
| counter how Apple goes about it 's business - if Google
| could get away with acting like Apple does to it's
| customers they probably would, Microsoft would also love to
| but they've been bitten before.
|
| Basic legislation guaranteeing certain freedoms for the
| consumers costs Apple and Google et al. nothing but
| massively empowers consumers in a sector where
| _information_ about the products is largely controlled by
| the creators of said products.
|
| This also prevents products becoming e-waste when the
| company is done supporting them.
| mrtksn wrote:
| When Apple rejects your App you receive an explanation and
| even screenshots and a call from the reviewer suggestions how
| to fix it.
| BikiniPrince wrote:
| Sadly, only 40% when your opposition is fragmented and
| frankly a crap interface.
|
| There are many things I like about Android, but most of them
| are philosophical.
|
| I find navigating it atrocious and I have spent quite a bit
| time reverse engineering some applications.
|
| Again, this is the competitor to apple? How much does each
| market capture. I suspect apple is doing much better here.
| NeutronStar wrote:
| > I find navigating it atrocious and I have spent quite a
| bit time reverse engineering some applications.
|
| I could say the same thing about Apple.
| RockyMcNuts wrote:
| I think in USA, it's 60/40 in favor of Apple. Globally,
| 70/30 in favor of Android https://gs.statcounter.com/os-
| market-share/mobile/worldwide
| philjohn wrote:
| To be fair - I'm more concerned about things like buying
| companies so that they have exclusive access to various
| technologies thereby denying other companies the ability to
| use them, e.g. the sensor used in the Kinect.
| [deleted]
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Lots of comments on here about whether it is good or bad to kick
| this particular company off the platform.
|
| Regardless of if the overall decision is good or bad, how FB goes
| about it, including messaging and forewarning is something that
| there is no excuse to not get right.
|
| Saying look at our ToS is absurd.
| blantonl wrote:
| Let's be fair here.
|
| Shared.com is in the business of producing and distributing crap
| content. That's a subjective term, but it's like the supreme
| court ruling on pornography, you'll know it when you see it.
|
| These guys most likely "skirt the line" to just operate as a
| mediocre and crappy content distribution network, that at scale,
| makes a lot of money because there is a certain subset of the
| population that will eat up any content at any quality level.
|
| Facebook decided they don't want to be a part of this type of
| content distribution, and they made a conscious business decision
| to not to engage with it's owners and operators because it will
| simply result in an exercise of splitting hairs and a reduction
| to the ridiculous. They just aren't going to bring themselves
| down to the level... and I don't blame them.
| bosswipe wrote:
| > Facebook decided ...
|
| How do you know that?
| _vertigo wrote:
| Facebook is absolutely full to the brim with "crap content".
| Crap content happens to be what drives engagement, so hosting
| crap content is a large part of Facebook's business model.
|
| You're speaking with a pretty authoritative tone there as
| though you're absolutely sure that Facebook has had a change of
| heart and only wants to host quality content, and there's no
| other reason why the pages were removed. Do you have some sort
| of proof for that, or are you just speculating? If you're
| speculating, don't you think it would be a good idea to match
| the tone of your post to your true amount of confidence in what
| you're saying, so as not to misinform people who might read
| your comment?
| blantonl wrote:
| I stand by what I posted. I'm allowed to be authoritative as
| I want in my opinions and what I deem to be a personal
| analysis of what is a subjective issue. If you aren't in
| agreement with my assertions, you are free to click the down
| arrow to the left of the post.
| santoshalper wrote:
| You're allowed to be anything you want. It's a free
| country. But 2c worth of advice - representing speculative
| things as high-confidence erodes your credibility. Unless
| you have some insight or information that everyone else
| here doesn't, you're really just full of it.
|
| "Facebook decided they don't want to be a part of this type
| of content distribution" - That is not stated as an implied
| opinion, it is stated as a fact with absolutely nothing to
| back it up. Certainly Facebook is just as filled with this
| kind of low-quality content today as it was yesterday or
| three months ago. There is just nothing to support your
| speculation that this is part of some movement by Facebook
| to improve quality of content.
| vosper wrote:
| > representing speculative things as high-confidence
| erodes your credibility
|
| I wish you were right, but I actually think most of the
| time the exact opposite is true: appearing highly-
| confident about speculative things makes someone seem
| more credible, rather than less.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| Right up until something you say gets proven to be wrong.
|
| The higher confidence you presented your wrong statement,
| the higher the hit to your credibility will be.
| chillacy wrote:
| I very much want this to be true but it seems you'll do
| fine if you can confidently spew off another explanation.
|
| https://religiondispatches.org/a-year-after-the-non-
| apocalyp...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| You could become the leader of the free world, even.
| lhorie wrote:
| I thought the down arrow was supposed to be used to
| indicate that a post is of low quality or that it doesn't
| conform to guidelines, not to express disagreement; and
| that disagreement was meant to be expressed by posting
| arguments
| afpx wrote:
| It seems more common these days to use it on HN to
| express disagreement. That wasn't the case years ago.
|
| I suspect it has to do with the reddit / youtube
| generation becoming adults. Polite disagreement seems to
| be on the way out.
| dazc wrote:
| Polite disagreement will often result in downvotes for
| oneself though. I think this is the problem?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| With all due respect, as someone who has been
| participating in online communities since the days of
| FidoNet, I don't think people have really changed.
| There's just more people, which itself drives up the
| opportunity for disagreement.
|
| And some of the most disagreeable people on my social
| media are old farts, too :)
| lhorie wrote:
| That theory makes sense, though it's unfortunate, IMHO.
| Personally, I'd prefer for comments to rank higher based
| on quality (irrespective of which way they lean) than
| hivemind inclinations. Seek well-roundedness and all
| that.
| r00fus wrote:
| If I suspect something is flamebait (ie, responses are
| not discussion I think belongs on HN as it's
| redundant/religious/reactive) and the content's value
| doesn't exceed that flamebait characteristic, I'll
| downvote.
|
| ie, I downvote things that I feel have an aggregate S/N
| degradation multiplier.
|
| I kinda miss /.'s moderation qualifiers.
| jolmg wrote:
| Everyone votes by their own rules. There's no official
| guidelines on how to use the voting buttons.
| politician wrote:
| Your comment inspired me to submit
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25636267
| harperlee wrote:
| Absolutely. I just mentally add "in my opinion" to
| everything I read and its liberating; I think way few
| people do it. More people should see the good wife.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| People (myself included) read these comments like a
| debugger -- "How can that be?! I triple checked my 'brain
| base'... that's wrong, must fix"
| _vertigo wrote:
| That's not what the down arrow is for. This is what I'm
| getting at.
|
| Instead of treating the comment section as a dumping ground
| for your purely speculative opinions masquerading as
| authoritative takes, and pushing the burden of nuance onto
| readers by asking them to downvote if they disagree, I
| think one should clearly state their opinions in an
| intellectually honest way. Then there is no need for
| downvoting if others disagree.
| [deleted]
| bosswipe wrote:
| You are misinforming the HN audience by making it sound
| like you know why FB took their action. In a way you are
| distributing crap content here.
| soperj wrote:
| That's not actually what the down arrow is for.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| Citation please.
| NeutronStar wrote:
| You want us to cite HN's rules? You're supposed to know
| them.
| soperj wrote:
| > Downvoting should not be used for simple disagreement.
|
| Used to be part of the guidelines. Seems as though
| they've removed it.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't respond with this sort of indignation even
| when the feeling is justified. It takes the discussion way
| off topic and encourages worse from others.
| javajosh wrote:
| Although I usually ignore responses like in the GP, I like
| what you wrote here. It implicitly names the unfair
| rhetorical attack (effectively the kind of strawman that
| treats you as if you spoke authoritatively, when you were
| clearly giving your opinion). But yeah, with the right
| audience you don't have to respond at all, we'll know
| wassup.
| aldarisbm wrote:
| But he did speak authoritatively, "Facebook decided..."
|
| Facebook didn't decide anything as far as we know, he's
| presenting his opinions as facts, they aren't.
| pwned1 wrote:
| I would go so far as to say that "crap content" is Facebook's
| entire business model.
| ianlevesque wrote:
| Hey now, my friends dogs and kids are very interesting! Or
| were when they used to go outside...
| ogre_codes wrote:
| If they could, they would eliminate dog/kid photos
| entirely because they don't make money off that stuff.
| They just show you enough of your friends dogs and kids
| to keep you around to view the profit generating crap.
| adamc wrote:
| It works because many FB users (probably the vast
| majority) don't fact-check anything. I've lost count of
| the number of times I did and found it to be untrue.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't harangue another user like this. The site
| guidelines put it this way: _" Have curious conversation;
| don't cross-examine."_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Curious conversation requires a certain lightness of touch.
| You can still make your same point that way; actually it will
| work better that way.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| It's obviously a judgment call but I don't think the GP
| comment was super pejorative. It was fulminating a bit
| (also against the guidelines), but not so much that we
| would post a moderation scolding. The issue with the
| comment I replied to is that it crossed into a personal
| harangue. That tends to degrade discussion much faster--
| note how with
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25634048 the thread
| is already headed down the drain.
| blantonl wrote:
| Who are you dang?
|
| Are you an official representative of HN? Because it
| appears that the vast majority of your comments are
| nothing but comments about other people's comments, or
| directives to follow guidelines.
|
| Frankly, it seems more positive for the community to vote
| with their feet on comments and posts vs one individual
| continuously navigating through posts and threads telling
| people how to behave.
|
| I'm serious about the first question...
| mooreds wrote:
| > Are you an official representative of HN?
|
| Yes, he is. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25225775
| acrispino wrote:
| he's a moderator
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-
| valley/th...
| xeromal wrote:
| hahahaha, if you've been on HN long enough, you'll see
| that dang is a selfless mod that does a damn good job and
| keeping HN pure as possible.
|
| He is the senate.
| rlt wrote:
| You've been on HN since 2009, surely you know who dang
| is.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| Dang keeps HN civilized. As readers we are in his debt.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| drtillberg wrote:
| I read the earlier comment as making aggressive, common-sense
| inteferences from 'facts' sprinkled through the original
| posting-- FB ended direct engagement with shared.com a long
| time ago, the shared.com ads were placed through 3d party
| contractors (maybe this is less exceptional than it sounds)
| and the OP says the reason he's sure FB was ok with the whole
| thing was shared.com's transparency about its business model
| ... which sounds like an admission it's low quality, that FB
| initiated communications about quality in the past, and that
| the OP was aware the shared.com content had implications for
| FB business standards. Those might be incorrect inferences,
| but they seem fair from the OP's marketing release.
|
| An alternate hypothesis is that most of the spend referenced
| by OP is ancient and relevant only for old-time sake. Again.
| OP didn't say that exactly, but it's a fair thing to question
| based on how the OP wrote the posting and selected the
| relevant time period.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I run a consulting company and if I decided to stop working for
| a client the right thing would be to give some explanation even
| if it's "We don't think your website meets our quality bar".
|
| Almost 80% of the ads I see on Facebook are of similar quality.
| If they're trying to reduce low quality content on their
| platform, than they should just say that.
| corobo wrote:
| Why open yourself up to a lawsuit though? If you say
| something that can't be solidly proven now you have to deal
| with lawyers
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Because it's the right thing to do and I doubt it really
| has much influence on liability unless you say something
| like "we're not working with you because you're a black
| woman".
| dstick wrote:
| I watched a documentary called "Suits" a while back about
| a corporate legal firm and that convinced me that you are
| wrong. Those well dressed professionals will use anything
| you say against you in the court of law!
| smarx007 wrote:
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1632701/ is a documentary?
|
| I am afraid you failed to read the fine print ;) I think
| the average legalese boilerplate is along the following
| lines: All characters and events depicted in this film
| are entirely fictitious. Any similarity to actual events
| or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
| ummonk wrote:
| You're replying to obvious sarcasm.
| viro wrote:
| Poe's Law
| Imnimo wrote:
| Wow, you were right about crap content. I'd never heard of
| shared.com, but the articles on that site are complete garbage.
| I really don't understand how that sort of thing can generate
| enough money to spend millions of dollars on ads.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| The shared.com content seems to be harmless fluff. Unless
| there's something underhanded going on here, I am inclined to
| admire their ability to turn manure into gold.
| xnyan wrote:
| Obviously anecdotal but from my experience of having done a
| bit of tech support for many friends and family members, this
| kind of content is extremely popular. By this kind of
| content, I mean what I consider low-effort memes, jokes and
| gifs surrounded with copious amounts of ads. Many if not most
| users seem to be ok with it.
| JVillella wrote:
| This is very common content marketing content. These articles
| are not intended to educate the reader, they're written to
| get high search rankings, and high click throughs.
| Imnimo wrote:
| So is the business that I buy an ad on Facebook, someone
| clicks on it, I then show them a bunch of ads, and I get
| paid enough for those ads to recoup the money I spent on my
| Facebook ad, and then some?
|
| Kind of genius, in a way.
| supernovae wrote:
| arbitration. Spend less on FB ads than what you earn shoving
| ads into the users browser. That's the real thing here, FB
| knows they can get crap content and earn more than 54 million
| lost in advertising it to 3rd party.
| trhway wrote:
| seems kind of similar to AMZN moving into specific
| goods/areas upon noticing how good the sellers are doing
| there.
|
| I wonder though how FB isn't officially a monopoly of
| social media yet, and thus isn't yet subject to related
| limitations, etc.
|
| https://adespresso.com/blog/facebook-statistics/
|
| "19. Facebook (and its ads) accounts for 80.4% of U.S.
| social referral share to eCommerce and retail sites."
| rkachowski wrote:
| How can you know Facebook decided anything? It could just as
| easily been an algorithmic error.
| Retric wrote:
| Algorithms don't close 57 Million dollar advertising accounts
| without some oversight.
| bigiain wrote:
| Not even "move fast and break things" evolved algorithms?
|
| (I suspect you are right though, and this is more likely to
| be a "hot or not" type arbitrary decision from a management
| team developed around superficial face value judgements and
| zero empathy... Apple ended up with a "Jobs culture",
| Facebook reflects Zuckerberg...)
| webmobdev wrote:
| > Facebook decided they don't want to be a part of this type of
| content distribution
|
| Isn't that a slippery slope? In my country, Facebook decided
| not to ban some right-wing posters for hate speech because the
| right-wing in power had managed to get one of their OWN into
| Facebook, who "advised" Facebook that fighting hate-speech from
| such people would adversely affect Facebook operation in India
| as the government in power won't be happy about it. This person
| also got Facebook to take down opposition ads during the
| elections, thus harming their electoral prospects.
|
| Source: _Facebook and Narendra Modi: How FB's policy head in
| India allowed a BJP politician to spread hate online so that it
| would not hurt its "business prospects"_ -
| https://churumuri.blog/2020/08/15/facebook-and-narendra-modi...
| IThinkImOKAY wrote:
| >Your Page has been unpublished
|
| They even give them a reason. How is:
|
| >they kicked me and my pages off without warning or explanation
|
| truthful?
| Yetanfou wrote:
| You answer gives me vibes of the recent spat of apologetic
| answers to the news of Apple banning the "Amphetamine" app in
| that you defend a behemoth banning something or someone on
| vague grounds - a discussion on this type of Stockholm syndrome
| can be found here [1]. My response on to how to handle the
| shenanigans of these corporate megaliths - by shunning them [2]
| - was voted down so I have to assume that this is not seen as a
| viable option either. Is the general opinion here really that
| we are to simply give in to the whims of these companies? The
| argument here is that _shared.com_ distributes "mediocre and
| crappy content". If that is the bar by which companies are to
| be measured Facebook itself would never be able to meet it.
|
| I sense a need for a new Ralph Nader, someone who has the clout
| to take on these companies and put them in their place. That
| place is not in the halls of power, it is not at the dining
| table of lawmakers, in the ear of regulators. Their place is on
| the market where they are to compete with other companies,
| where developers and users use their power of choice to keep
| them from attaining too much power as they currently clearly
| have.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25618066
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25606807
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| > Is the general opinion here really that we are to simply
| give in to the whims of these companies?
|
| Ans: I can't pay for the $2M house I bought in Noe Valley on
| a normal salary.
| Yetanfou wrote:
| That is just a matter of priorities. That $2M house in Noe
| Valley is a $500K house elsewhere as many ex-Californians
| have already found out. Yes, that'd imply moving elsewhere
| which creates another stack of priorities to sort out, some
| of which actually would point towards moving as well -
| where do you want your potential or actual children to grow
| up, etc. Still, sometimes there is a need to give up some
| temporary comfort to preserve a longer-term comfort.
| wesleywt wrote:
| If it was Facebook's policy to remove what hackernews
| determines to be "crap content" then this should be
| communicated to the users so that they can adjust their
| behavior. They did not change their policies nor was the
| account flagged as being outside the TOS.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > Shared.com is in the business of producing and distributing
| crap content. ...
|
| > They just aren't going to bring themselves down to the
| level... and I don't blame them.
|
| Without being familiar with Shared, I'm willing to take you at
| your word on the company. I do question your conclusion though.
| I've seen no indications that Facebook has any standards and if
| anything they seem to promote crap content not bury it. If it
| drives engagement and doesn't bring legal trouble to their
| doorstep, Facebook seems to be all over it.
|
| Which makes me think there is something else going on here.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Exactly. Number of crappy Chinese comedy videos with millions
| of reacts is astounding.
| admax88q wrote:
| There's a difference between "crap content" shared by users
| on the platform, and crap content promoted via ads.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| The difference is primarily the fact that the crap content
| promoted by ads pays Facebook's bills.
| maxehmookau wrote:
| I was with you until this statement:
|
| > Facebook decided they don't want to be a part of this type of
| content distribution
|
| Facebook's entire business model is built around the
| proliferation of "crap" content.
| BikiniPrince wrote:
| Well let's be fair here.
|
| They made that conscious decision after running away with the
| money.
|
| After the first few mil wouldn't you understand your partner a
| little better?
|
| At 57 it's a rocky divorce and you know full well who you were
| sleeping with.
| slenk wrote:
| > Shared.com is in the business of producing and distributing
| crap content.
|
| Isn't that essentially FB's goal too? Albeit crap content that
| hits your brain's pleasure center
| h43k3r wrote:
| You are right about content. But in that case FB should have
| clearly communicated about violations for those pages and given
| a chance to correct them.
|
| Also taking down personal accounts seems more like an automated
| action where a graph of related accounts are taken down.
| SilasX wrote:
| It's not even about violations (which there may not have
| been), just some kind of explanation. "Hey we don't want to
| be involved in this kind of content, we're making a judgment
| call to disallow it."
| blantonl wrote:
| With regards to this, my point was that Facebook doesn't
| want to get into a long drawn out discussion with
| whataboutisms and splitting hairs on policy.
|
| They made a business decision to move on from this content
| platform. I love to hate on facebook with the best of them,
| but they really don't "owe" anyone anything.
|
| There seems to be this pervasive attitude in technology
| circles that platforms "owe" other businesses and
| individuals something when they build businesses on top of
| said platforms. Just because you spent 54MM in ads on a
| platform doesn't entitle you to anything when a legal or
| business decision has to be made. Is it crappy not to
| communicate and give an explanation...? you bet it is. Did
| that 54MM in spend generate anything for Shared... you bet
| it did. Everyone was a winner until Facebook moved on.
|
| I suspect that Facebook and Shared working to negotiate out
| of this will just result in a lot of spinning wheels,
| ammunition collection on both sides to pursue legal
| remedies, and nothing of real value changing. Facebook said
| we're moving on. Done.
| SilasX wrote:
| Okay there are two separate issues here:
|
| 1) I think it's very unhelpful to speak in terms of "not
| owing things" to people and defending anyone whoever does
| the absolute minimum until they're dragged kicking and
| screaming to extend the most basic courtesy. Part of
| being a decent human being is extending such basic
| courtesies to others _even when there 's no legal
| obligation to do so_, and, when an org doesn't do that,
| it's absolutely right to call them out on it.
|
| 2) If you're right, that this only came after extensive
| negotiation in which FB did reveal their objections, then
| yes, it's fair to call the advertiser out on _that_ , for
| misrepresenting what explanation FB gave him.
|
| Edit: Also,
|
| >With regards to this, my point was that Facebook doesn't
| want to get into a long drawn out discussion with
| whataboutisms and splitting hairs on policy.
|
| That's not relevant, because FB can recognize when
| they're making a judgment call; my point was just that
| it's courteous to at least recognize when you're doing
| so.
| nojokes wrote:
| In what kind of Lalaland is 50 million nothing?
| maskedinvader wrote:
| I guess parent comment is comparing facebook's quarterly
| revenue (~20 Billion) from ad sales, 50 million would be
| a fraction of a percent of 1 quarter of ad revenue I
| would imagine for a company like Facebook.
| sfblah wrote:
| Ok, but if an advertiser spends $57M across many years
| generating likes on the platform and doesn't change its
| business practices materially across that timespan, it seems
| like they might be entitled to a refund when the pages are shut
| down.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| And who are Facebook to decide what is crap? Since they claim
| to be somewhat of a public utility surely everyone within the
| bounds of the law should be able to post what they want.
|
| Facebook are, of course, not a publisher, yet they are now the
| editor?
|
| Sounds to me they are whatever they want to be, depending on
| the audience.
| string wrote:
| A business that creates garbage content with a business model
| that almost exclusively relies on another garbage company's ad
| platform.
|
| I have very little sympathy for companies that run ads in the
| first place. This just seems like good news to me.
| sto_hristo wrote:
| The bigger picture is that it can be anyone's business - even
| the most "pristine" one. Getting banned without any notice when
| you run a business is just low and pathetic.
| rwdim wrote:
| Most likely, one of your competitors negotiated a deal where you
| were deplatformed as a condition. $57M over 13/14 years, or $100M
| right now... easy choice for Facebook.
| conanbatt wrote:
| That is subject to a severe anti-trust litigation
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Sounds like something that could be tortious interference but
| how could it ever be proven unless someone on the inside talks?
| The absoluteness of the communication cutoff certainly makes it
| seem like Facebook has something they want to ensure doesn't
| have any possibility of accidentally leaking.
| jgurewitz wrote:
| This is not likely at all.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Is that really the most likely?
|
| I'd suggest it's much more likely that they tripped some
| automated spam protection or a moderator thought they looked
| suspicious, than there's a conspiracy against the company by a
| competitor.
|
| That conspiracy would be of a high reputational risk to
| Facebook and the competitor, and would have a paper-trail in
| contracts that guarantee Facebook that ad revenue for the
| deplatforming.
|
| It seems highly unlikely to me, as much as I believe Facebook
| to have poor moral standing.
| dbt00 wrote:
| I agree. It's far more likely some of the content mill sweeps
| they made during the election caught them.
| otterley wrote:
| And nothing of value was lost.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I seriously hope these guys get their pages re-instated. Crazy
| that Facebook would ban their personal accounts as well. I wonder
| if they have decided that the concept of "sharing" something is
| redundant with Facebook's own features, so they decided to wipe
| it out. Shame on FB.
|
| That said, I don't know of many "small businesses" that can pull
| $52m in ad spend, even if it's over 20 years ;)
| danpalmer wrote:
| This stood out to me too, but that's ~$2.5m a year, and if the
| business is ad-arbitrage (buying FB ads to get views on ads on
| their own site), then I could imagine it being quite low
| margin, 15% margin is a ~$3m a year business, and if you're
| paying 5 employees, taxes, etc out of that last $500k, I can
| understand calling that "small".
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Platforms like Facebook can be an avenue to a great revenue
| stream but we've seen time and time again they can be capricious,
| passive aggressive, and tone deaf. Some day all of this will
| catch up to them but in the meantime, being dependent on any one
| platform for your survival is like playing Russian Roulette with
| an automated gun.
| dustinmoris wrote:
| I've become increasingly more skeptical when I read those
| stories.
|
| Let me be clear, I absolutely despise Facebook, but as I
| understand it, they are massively under fire from all sorts of
| governments over moderating the content which is posted on their
| platforms. There is a chance that this business knew they were
| doing something borderline dodgy in a grey area and Facebook
| started to weed those "bad" actors out in the moment of heat. I'm
| not implying that this is the case for sure, but it's not
| entirely impossible to imagine. Perhaps it's good that when
| governments take action and put pressure on FAANGs that they are
| even prepared to cancel a 57M customer if that means staying in
| business for themselves.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| That's the really bad thing about being the victim of
| algorithmic discrimination (like I was too with FB ads) and
| quasi-monopoly abuse. There are plenty of people with similar
| stories like this one complaining on forums like r/PPC. Dealing
| with Facebook is like a bureaucratic nightmare from a Kafka
| story even for customers who spend millions of dollars.
|
| But of course these cases remain a minority or else Facebook
| would already be bankrupt. That's why the majority will call
| these people whiners, probably guilty, and so on.
|
| Basically, what Facebook is doing is automatized slander.
| You've violated some policy but we don't tell you which one.
| You've been caught in "suspicious behavior" (an actual term
| used by them) but we don't tell you what we mean by that.
| You've tried to circumvent our policies - or maybe you haven't,
| just beg us to give you another chance.
|
| Let's just say it's not fun having to deal with this, and no
| company should rely much on Facebook ads.
| Gunax wrote:
| I agree that skepticism is necessary, but it's likely a lot
| less logical than that.
|
| They probably tripped some algorithm.
|
| This happened last year to podcast-addict (one of the most
| popular applications in Google's Android store) [1]. The lesson
| I take away is: even big players spending millions are subject
| to _the algorithm_.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427
| tomaszs wrote:
| Over years of being a CEO of social media agency I have heard
| about a lot of such situations. Also we were helping small
| businesses that was harmed by Facebook actions. Sometimes it was
| possible to fix it, sometimes not.
|
| In this particular case I strongly believe the platform developed
| was competing with Facebook and it may be the cause Facebook shut
| it down.
|
| It is my personal opinion however and may be not true.
|
| But all of my experience and knowledge tells me so.
|
| There might be that public pressure will force Facebook to
| reenable the business and I hope it will happen.
|
| However there are a lot of businesses that was shut down and died
| because there they wasn't able to put a pressure on Facebook.
|
| It is the main reason why Facebook in particular should be
| prevented from making more harm, and we should all do everything
| what is possible to not be dependant on 3rd party companies.
| ike77 wrote:
| I cannot wrap my head around how that could even be possible?
|
| They mention they had FB representatives physically received at
| their offices. Couldn't they join those directly?
|
| I expect that if you spent 57 mio $ in any business, the minimum
| would be to have a direct telephone contact with a sales rep /
| account manager and to review the relationship quarterly.
| etskinner wrote:
| They do say that they no longer have that avenue in the
| article:
|
| > I have visited their offices and have hosted their
| representatives at mine. I still cherish my relationships with
| all of them.
|
| > Over the past few years, however, the lines of communication
| have gone dark. Instead of our trusted Facebook partners, we
| found ourselves trying to communicate with 3rd party
| contractors who didn't always share our goals and objectives or
| understand our business. There was little interest in helping
| us understand new Facebook policies or what we were expected to
| do to comply with them.
| PeterisP wrote:
| This is not the first time I have heard something like "There
| was little interest in helping us understand new Facebook
| policies or what we were expected to do to comply with them.
| " This is generally said when the new policies are
| intentionally designed to keep out a whole niche of shady
| behavior, so that complying would require to abandon their
| core business model; i.e. it's not really expected that they
| would comply, the policies are explicitly written to stop
| doing business with them and also every future company like
| theirs.
|
| If they could work out something with the customer
| representatives to mostly keep doing what they want to do
| while fitting within the letter of the policy, that would
| just indicate a bug in the policy text that needs to be
| fixed.
| martin_a wrote:
| > They mention they had FB representatives physically received
| at their offices. Couldn't they join those directly?
|
| Two sentences later it becomes clearly that those contacts have
| left or whatever and they have been since dealing with whoever
| was not really involved with Facebook.
| arp242 wrote:
| The ~$60million is over 15 years, so it's about $330k/month on
| average, which is still a very substantial amount of money, but
| at "Facebook scale" this is pocket money you find in the sofa;
| their revenue is about $5.8 billion _a month_. For Facebook,
| the effect is like refusing to serve a customer their coffee at
| a coffee shop.
|
| I suppose that's the real problem with these kind of issues;
| you see the same on e.g. YouTube where even fairly large
| channels acting in good faith can run in to problems. I don't
| think there's any malice involved, but it's just too much
| effort to fix, there are other things going on, and they've got
| enough money anyway: so why bother?
|
| Even just a few years ago, Facebook's revenue was a lot
| smaller, so that would explain why they were more outgoing at
| the time.
| MereInterest wrote:
| $330k/month means that you could have multiple employees
| specifically and solely tasked with managing this one
| account. It is not a small amount by any means.
| ufmace wrote:
| jgurewitz's post is probably closer to the expectation.
| $330k/month is a nice chunk of change, but that's their
| primary revenue that's expected to mostly go to support the
| rest of their business operations. They're obviously not
| going to spend all of it on employees to manage that
| specific account.
| mhh__ wrote:
| You _could_ but isn 't the whole thesis of the internet-
| business a la Google or Facebook that it's "automated"?
| jasonv wrote:
| Ad buy isn't that automated. Check out vendors like
| Wordstream -- it stays complicated above the minimal
| purchase threshholds.
| jgurewitz wrote:
| Not true at all. 330k a month might at best get you one
| representative who has a book of business around 75-100
| accounts.
| ike77 wrote:
| Well yes and no.
|
| FB revenue in 2019 was 70e9$. I also assume that Freebies
| spending was not constant over the 16 years. So their
| spending represented almost 1/10000 of FB revenue.
|
| I agree you can probably afford to lose that as a business
| owner but you probably can't be "meh, whatever" either. I
| expect that a decision of that scale would have probably be
| considered by many people / relatively highly ranked
| employee.
|
| (At least, at that scale, I wouldn't give the authority to
| two low level support staff and an algorithm to delete
| 1/10000 of my global revenues...)
| arp242 wrote:
| To clarify: I don't think that "meh whatever" is literally
| what people are saying (to each other or themselves), it's
| just that there are also other customers, new leads, and
| all sorts of other things to do, so it's more of a "doesn't
| matter enough to actually take action"-kind of thing. Or,
| in short, "meh, whatever" :-)
|
| And there are probably other factors as well, such as poor
| internal communication, algorithms making poor decisions,
| and more. But those are all solvable problems and I
| _suspect_ that "meh whatever"-attitude plays a fairly
| large role in them not getting fixed at various levels. I
| mean, if my company left 330k/month on the table then I'd
| run after that faster than Usain Bolt. But do you think
| Zuckerberg or other top-level managers at Facebook will?
|
| But I have no insight in any of this, so I'm just guessing
| really...
| jjd33 wrote:
| I had a look at what shared.com is. I salute Facebook for banning
| you and wish for the entire world to permaban you.
| TLightful wrote:
| Facebook mafia does what now?
| eb0la wrote:
| IMHO FB ads a a pile of #@ _!
|
| In my experience, a message sent to the appropiate FB group can
| outperform by a factor of 10 facebok ads. Not just clickthroughs,
| but also repeated visits after 2 weeks.
|
| If you buy traffic from a specific country, they will send you
| from _whenever else* while they charge you for geolocated
| traffic. Sad thing IP addresses are easy to geolocate this days
| and they miserably fail to do it.
|
| I wonder how they work with stuff you cannot compare like similar
| audiences..
| steeleyespan wrote:
| Much smaller scale, but I got kicked off Adsense after running
| for over 10 years. No guidance, no feedback, etc. Even our direct
| Adsense rep said she had no input with the policy teams. They
| kept about 1.5mm in revenue.
|
| It is hard being wholly dependent on a large company (Google,
| Facebook, etc.), but not much choice you have either when riding
| that wave on their product.
| zentiggr wrote:
| Sounds to me like this should be the zillionth warning sign that
| leaning on a FAANG for any significant portion of your business
| activities is a critical mistake.
|
| If there is no customer support, there is no reliability, period.
| You can delude yourself into thinking you have a resource, when
| what you have is a niche in somebody else's place.
|
| Of course this will throw his business into chaos.
|
| Time to sue Facebook for unfair business practices. Or if that's
| not allowed under the TOS, walk away and find the next path.
|
| Every story I hear paints another stroke of the picture of
| Facebook turning into a cesspool of AI-controlled careless swamp
| of attention-grabbing, only mitigated by reporting on their most
| callous bullshit.
| beshrkayali wrote:
| This reads like an outcry from a wolf in sheep's clothing.
|
| I see this as a good sign. I haven't used Facebook in over 6
| years and don't intend to. Everything Facebook is piholed on my
| network. But I'm glad they're starting to kick out trash content
| producers.
|
| And yeah, like others have said, if you spend ~$60M on Facebook
| ads (among others), I don't think you can call yourself a small
| business. This is like those 6 year old companies that still
| consider themselves startups.
|
| If you make enough revenue from content farms to spend that much
| on ads AND getting kicked off of Facebook jeopardizes your
| "business" that much, I'm gonna assume you engage in some dark
| patterns to collect/sell data of your visitors, or to place ads
| in shady ways, or some form of SEO pollution. At the very least,
| you run native ads disguised as content. I wouldn't want to have
| any business with you either.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| fully in the hands of Facebook
|
| Absolutely deserved. I hope others use this as an opportunity to
| learn and not make the same mistake.
|
| (completely ignoring ads being a shady business anyways)
| onepointsixC wrote:
| This seems needlessly dismissive. Who do you buy ads from if
| not FB and Google?
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| What mistakes? Trusting Facebook?
| zentiggr wrote:
| Yes.
| yls wrote:
| Probably also putting all eggs into one basket.
| logronoide wrote:
| It's hard to understand that a business partner for 15 years and
| after dozens of millions of dollars spent can kick you in the @@s
| and ghost you without any explanation. This kind of behaviors
| from large corporations have to stop.
| drcongo wrote:
| Bit of a stretch to call Facebook a "partner" to _any_
| business. They're racketeers and building a business on the
| back of them is frankly insane.
| logronoide wrote:
| If you pay such a large amount of money I think "partner"
| should be the right word... but you are right, they don't
| deserve that. May be "cannibals" is more appropriate.
| zentiggr wrote:
| No one but Google, Apple or Amazon are remotely close to being
| 'partners' with Facebook. Unless you count hedge finds or
| multinationals in other industries.
|
| Facebook's cash flow is enough that even this company's revenue
| is a rounding error on _weekly_ numbers.
|
| In other words, FB don't care, don't let the door hit you.
|
| If some player has a few billion in FB revenue at stake, I'll
| bet they can at least reach a first tier CSR.
| tssva wrote:
| For all those doing math and commenting regarding Facebook
| revenues vs this ad spend while you do your math keep in mind
| that Facebook revenues are reported in US dollars and the $57M
| mentioned in this article is Canadian dollars.
| jgurewitz wrote:
| To maybe help clarify, the author mentions 57M spent over 14
| years. My guess is that this was more front loaded given FB
| dynamics, but evenly distributed that's 300k a month, which might
| barely qualify you for a small business representative. The size
| and scale of FB are such that unless you're well over 1M a month
| you are a small business.
| ike77 wrote:
| It's 1/10000th of their global revenues. And 1/3000th of their
| US revenues.
|
| Assuming a Zipf distribution for their clients spending, it
| easily place them in the top 1000 biggest spenders.
|
| I wouldn't call it small.
| jgurewitz wrote:
| If they were spending 57M a year that would be different and
| they would like likely have an enterprise level team. 57M
| over 14 years doesn't warrant that, and in particular, I'd
| expect that to have been primarily in the prime years for
| content on FB, 09-12.
|
| Assuming an even distribution over 14 years, for FB today,
| spending 300k a month might warrant a rep but it's at the
| very bottom of tiered spend.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Looking at shared.com content - If I was forced to guess what
| might justify this apart from an FB screw up, is that while no
| single post breaks FB rules. The quantity that they are posting
| now breaks a new FB policy and that shared.com is seen as
| producing huge quantities of low quality, click bait content that
| FB see as 'polluting` their platform, leeching away users/ad
| viewers.
|
| That is just a guess.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I'm with others who point out that FB is already a dumpster
| fire of junk, so jettisoning low-quality clickbait isn't on
| their agenda.
|
| What I _do_ think is on FB 's agenda is producing and profiting
| off of low-quality clickbait directly. Thus, someone at FB
| could have decided the OP's business is competing with them.
| Even if you don't agree that FB is all about low-quality
| clickbait right now, it shouldn't shock anyone that FB might
| decide to get into that market and take steps to squash a
| potential competitor.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Who pays money to show ads on shared.com? At first glance it
| looks like generic adsense, probably opted in to any
| available ad exchanges.
|
| So presumably facebook is miffed that it pays better to take
| eyeballs away from their feed and point them at google ads.
|
| It does make one wonder why FB doesn't stick adsense on the
| feed or increase the price of their ads; clearly there's
| plenty of room for arbitrage.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| > The quantity that they are posting now breaks a new FB policy
|
| Could you tell me more about that? What new policy?
| picodguyo wrote:
| I'm surprised by all the comments blaming the author here. Even
| if their content is garbage, they made foolish business
| decisions, yadda yadda, Facebook's policy of banning business
| accounts and all associated personal accounts with no explanation
| or recourse should not be allowed legally.
| Justin_K wrote:
| This won't be a popular comment but if your entire business model
| is based upon the existence of FB, you should have had a formal
| contract in place, as well as dedicated points of contact. I
| can't imagine that someone with millions in annual spend couldn't
| require this of FB.
| mattficke wrote:
| >Freebies has been plagued by recent ad violations suggesting
| they are not following policy for dating ads. Freebies has never
| run a dating site, nor has it advertised for dating sites on
| Facebook. The CEO of Freebies, Mike Debutte, tried in vain to
| reach out to Facebook for help in appealing the supposed
| violations that are causing major disruptions and loss of revenue
| to our business. It was frustrating and handicapped the business,
| but it had become the cost of doing business on Facebook, so we
| just kept doing the best we could to continue to grow the
| business.
|
| Isn't this the explanation? I get that they disagree with the
| substance of the violations, but it doesn't sound like this came
| out of nowhere like the headline claims. They were repeatedly
| flagged for ad violations, then their pages were shut down when
| they ignored these as the "cost of doing business".
| jbob2000 wrote:
| I looked at the shared.com website, it seems like it's just a
| content farm for marketing affiliations. They were probably
| banned for being a source of spam, even if the dashboard says
| "green" (maybe there are ways to systematically game this
| rating, very odd the article is so hung up on this rating).
| sonotmyname wrote:
| > Isn't this the explanation?
|
| Err, how is that an explanation? If they don't run dating ads
| and Facebook says their dating ads are non-compliant, it's a
| non-answer. It'd be like me firing you for having blue hair
| when you don't have blue hair.
| mattficke wrote:
| The claim isn't that the explanation is incorrect or based on
| a faulty premise, they're saying that there was _no
| explanation at all_.
|
| Maybe they're right about FB incorrectly flagging their ads,
| I'm not in a position to judge. However, they're making a
| misleading claim by saying this happened without explanation
| and leading with the image showing no Page Quality
| violations, since the affiliated Freebies page did apparently
| have numerous violations.
| bryan0 wrote:
| Yes they were kicked off for ad violations, but the violations
| were not explained.
| capableweb wrote:
| I'm failing to understand how they are ignoring violations when
| A) they don't see which policy rules are being broken B) the
| rule that Facebook says been broken has norelevance to the ads
| they actually run and C) the CEO of Freebies tried to reach out
| to Facebook to clear things up.
| gadders wrote:
| From the article:
|
| >>In total, several pages that had 21 million fans had been
| unpublished, and Facebook had taken action against me,
| personally, that one assumes are reserved for the worst in our
| society -- criminals, pedophiles and conspiracy theorists.
|
| Er, no. Just be slightly more right-wing that the current
| Facebook overton window and you'll get banned.
| throwaway99x99 wrote:
| "Facebook had taken action against me, personally, that one
| assumes are reserved for the worst in our society -- criminals,
| pedophiles and _conspiracy theorists_. "
|
| Yah, it's those conspiracy theorists that are the worst in
| society.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Cult-like conspiracies like the QAnon stuff are not harmless.
| Comparing them to criminals is warranted, at least after the
| incident where one of them attempted a mass shooting.
|
| But still that quoted sentence is quite weird. Banning someone
| from an online platform is the standard procedure for policy
| violations, not just for the "worst in our society" no matter
| how you define those.
| kurtschwanda wrote:
| I've been in therapy for years after my uncle tried to convince
| me the mob killed JFK.
| xwdv wrote:
| Before anyone gets too impressed (though I may be too late
| judging by the chorus that has formed), it's $57M _CAD_ , and
| over the course of 14 years, so roughly about $3.2M USD in
| spending per year, or roughly $266k USD per month. Fairly typical
| customer.
| jaywalk wrote:
| > Facebook had taken action against me, personally, that one
| assumes are reserved for the worst in our society -- criminals,
| pedophiles and conspiracy theorists.
|
| Lumping in conspiracy theorists with pedophiles? This guy is an
| ass, his business was probably barely legitimate, and I don't
| feel sorry for him in the slightest.
| 55555 wrote:
| I read this as a tongue-in-cheek joke.
| sto_hristo wrote:
| Different outlets for different kinds of mental illnesses.
| There aren't really any levels to being disgusting. Once you
| hit that definition, you end up alongside with everything out
| there that fits it. Spreading hate, lies, paranoia,
| disinformation, your personal delusions is disgusting as is
| pedophilia.
| dmje wrote:
| Trying hard to empathise with company spending $57m on ads.
| Failing.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| $60 millions for 25 million fans? Gosh that seems like an abysmal
| ROI, unless your levels of engagement are through the roof.
| 12xo wrote:
| Before you get upset, is this company actually providing any
| service of value to anyone but themselves or is their entire
| business based on arbitrage of ads from traffic they are able to
| siphon away and off from FB?
| kowlo wrote:
| That is a serious amount of money. Are Facebook ads really that
| effective?
|
| The final paragraph makes me sad - this company is entirely at
| the mercy of Facebook.
| dbt00 wrote:
| > The final paragraph makes me sad - this company is entirely
| at the mercy of Facebook.
|
| The content is up, go read. Shared.com, fun.shared.com, see if
| you would ever want their headlines in your news feed.
| jyriand wrote:
| Where there is demand, there is supply.
| CabSauce wrote:
| This is hopefully the answer. Hopefully facebook is trying to
| improve their feed. It's absolute garbage.
| sb8244 wrote:
| I don't want to read their content, but why should I (or
| someone else) get to make the decision of what others choose
| to read? I see lots of stuff shared on Facebook that I just
| can't believe people are into, but they are really into it.
| Good for them for finding enjoyment in it. If I don't want to
| see that content, I can mute the person to clean up _my_
| feed.
|
| If the content doesn't violate any rules and people want to
| read it, then it has a place. If it does violate rules, then
| communicate those clearly. Given that, I think that this is
| most likely not an issue of rules violation but of Facebook
| not wanting the content on their platform (and not wanting to
| actually justify that).
| martin_a wrote:
| Yeah, really not high-quality content, I don't want to read
| that stuff . Nevertheless that should not be the reason to
| kill your accounts without any prior notice after spending 60
| million in ads.
| ppeetteerr wrote:
| A pattern that I see with tech companies like these is poor
| communication about features and decisions made within the
| company. Price changes and policy changes, understandably, are
| made quickly and following rules. What about when the UI changes,
| or when a policy change affects how a user can behave? That's
| probably either not communicated at all or hidden in the many,
| many pages of the T&Cs.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Probably got mistaken for misleading political content. If you
| search for `"shared.com" "trump"` or `"shared.com" "biden"` there
| are some pretty tabloid-tier conspiracy articles.
| lmilcin wrote:
| I hope you understand the fault lies completely in you.
|
| Facebook is know to do or say whatever is needed to further their
| business. It not a new thing, it is a pattern of deception well
| documented here on HN.
|
| By choosing to build your business on FB platform you should have
| understanding, that you are not really building your own business
| but rather you are building business for FB which lets you build
| business on their platform until such time they decide it is not
| worth it and kick you out.
|
| You chose an ally that has no morals and you let yourself be
| completely dependent on their willingness to keep you.
|
| Every business owner is responsible for thinking for themselves
| and investigating their partners. If this was your only partner,
| on which you were completely reliant for your business, it means
| you have catastrophically neglected your responsibility. Have you
| done your job you would realize that there is a risk and you
| would try to save or diversify in case the worst comes. Instead
| you were just focused on reaping benefits rather than thinking
| long term.
|
| Pass the message to other people as widely as possible so that
| public is aware of how FB conducts business so that less people
| will face the same tragedy in the future.
| [deleted]
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| I wonder if this is an opportunity for business insurance.
|
| I.e., being shunned by Facebook or Google is a high-consequence,
| low-probability, hard-to-predict event.
|
| You may as well treat it like building a factory in an earthquake
| zone.
| drno123 wrote:
| The author of the article equates conspiracy theorists to
| pedophiles.
| santoshalper wrote:
| I don't think he was making a value judgment. These are just
| groups of people Facebook is actively trying to keep off their
| site. His point is that his companies aren't part of those
| groups. Based on quick (not even remotely thorough) look at
| shared.com, I tend to agree. It's just a bunch of buzzfeed-
| level listicles, but I didn't find anything scammy or harmful.
|
| Perhaps Facebook is trying to raise the "quality" of what is
| shared on their platform (not just the ethics), but if that is
| the case I haven't heard anything about it. Facebook is
| absolutely stuffed to the gills with this kind of commodity-
| grade filler content.
|
| Based on what he posted, my guess is that the author delegated
| too much editorial control in his mini media empire and one of
| the sites in his network published some pretty objectionable
| content. If I were a betting man, I'd say it was COVID/vaccine
| related.
| richy_ wrote:
| shared.com is in the business of click arbitrage. Paying for
| cheap clicks on one publisher to drive clicks with another.
| stevespang wrote:
| Dig deeper, the reason Facebook nixed you is that Zuck is going
| to reproduce your content, copycat you, and wipe you out.
|
| Apple is nixing Facebooks ecosystem from preying on Apple
| customers data, and the Zuck whines loud and clear with full page
| ads in major newspapers.
|
| Welcome to 2121.
| havkom wrote:
| I'm glad that FB treats everyone equally.
| frouge wrote:
| Be happy they did, you can now build a better a world by stopping
| feeding facebook. Put your money somewhere else.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I uninstalled the app a couple weeks ago. Amazing positive
| difference in my mental health and focus.
|
| Now to kick my HN habit...
| flatus wrote:
| Watch whether Facebook (or a partner) duplicates Shared.com's
| content. This may be a very clear example of monopoly behavior.
| markvdb wrote:
| > If given the chance, I would go to great lengths to adjust my
| business, to right whatever wrong Facebook believes I have
| committed. I would change my business model, and shift the
| direction of my business to ensure I am fully compliant with
| Facebook's policies. I have done it many times before. I would
| like to do it again.
|
| This is a reminder Facebook is too powerful.
| agilob wrote:
| >e, I would go to great lengths to adjust my business, to right
| whatever wrong Facebook believes I have committed
|
| Also a reminder not to base your business on a functionality of
| a monster.
| boffinism wrote:
| Lots of comments here to the effect of "shame on you for letting
| yourself be so dependent on them", but the awful thing is that
| there are so many businesses whose unit economics _only_ make
| sense if they can buy visitors via Facebook. They are way, way
| cheaper for a lot of B2C businesses than any other ad network. I
| don't know why. Is it because people who are browsing FB/IG are
| bored and actively looking for ads to click on? Either way, it
| sucks that no one else offers the same access and CPM/CPC etc
| zentiggr wrote:
| Sounds like cases of 'play with fire, you're going to get
| burned'.
|
| If your business is dependent on FB, time to pivot. Q. E. D.
| scottrogowski wrote:
| I visited "shared.com" and the content looks pretty innocuous.
| The first story is about office chairs, the second is about
| celebrity engagements. Sure, it's clickbait, but we're talking
| about facebook - not nature magazine.
|
| Maybe facebook changed their ad policies to prohibit this kind of
| content. That's within their right but they owe an explanation to
| their advertisers and perhaps some wind-down time.
|
| This sort of arbitrary ban-by-T&C, with no judicial oversight, is
| further evidence that Facebook, and likely all large tech
| companies, are abusing their monopoly power and need
| significantly more regulation.
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