Experiment Alleges Facebook is Scamming Advertisers out of Billions of Dollars

http://www.thedailyheap.com/facebook-scamming-advertisers-out-of-billions-of-dollars

by yesplorer • 12 years ago

22 6 12 years ago

shenoybr• 12 years ago

This is being discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514

In reality, the researcher doesn't say by any means that FB is scamming advertisers. He merely explains and exposes flaws in their algorithm. The headline is flawed in my opinion.

Robadob• 12 years ago

The title is a bit of a link bait, the video which was posted in an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514) stated that, through Facebooks paid ads you also get likes from click farms (presumably because click farms like pages they aren't paid to like in order to avoid detection).

This means that a higher percentage of your likes are from click farms than if you gained your likes organically, so when you pay for a post to reach a set number of your fans, a larger percentage of that is lost to click farm users who you don't want, than if you had purely organic likes.

darkstar999• 12 years ago

Bad headline. The end of the video, discussed here [1], concludes that the problem is that clickfarms masquerade their activities by clicking on random ads. The problem isn't that Facebook is scamming, it is the scammers scamming Facebook.

Too bad I can't downvote this junk.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514

pmorici• 12 years ago

Wasn't the conclusion more that the scammers are scamming Facebook but Facebook isn't doing much/anything about it perhaps because they are benefiting financially from it?

james33• 12 years ago

This lost all credibility when it said "Facebook is rumored to be worth somewhere around $100 billion." First of all, a public company has a specific value, it isn't rumored to be anything. Second, the current value of FB on the market is north of $160B.

redblacktree• 12 years ago

You found one nit to pick and threw the baby out with the bathwater?

Experiment Alleges Facebook is Scamming Advertisers out of Billions of Dollars

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