Facebook is destroying my business. What can I do?

by datingapps • 12 years ago

51 16 12 years ago

bradhe• 12 years ago

Man, this really demonstrates the level to which the "major advertisers" (Google, Facebook, and friends) actually control the internet--the ecosystem is incredible! It also indicates how much it sucks to base your business on someone else's business. I had a friends company end up in a similar spot after Google started crackin' down on farming AdSense links.

The best possible thing you could do would be to find an alternate advertising model. That is, however, likely impossible for you at this point.

All I can say is good luck--interested in seeing what others have to say!

bruceb• 12 years ago

This is the first time I have read of an advertiser who saying their business is dependent on fb. Usually it is Google cut us off or lowered us in the results thereby killing our business. Maybe fb should highlight this story next time one of the many fb ROI sucks/fake followers stories comes up.

datingapps6• 12 years ago

Indeed, I never thought I'd be authoring a post like this, but I really think dating is one area where Facebook holds a monopoly like grip

UnethicalHacks• 12 years ago

There was a post some time ago about a fast food delivery company using porn sites to generate leads. it's certainly not glamorous but you might wanna try that. i'm seeing pretty low CPMs.

datingapps6• 12 years ago

Yes, I've seen this post, and we've experimented there too, but we didn't get results on par with what we saw with Facebook. Hard to do targeting there as well beyond locale.

tluyben2• 12 years ago

We had this happen a few times with Google. Reading this brings back the feelings I felt at that time; the feeling of being powerless to something 'unfair'. I guess everyone had that one time or another. The reasons why things like this happen are debatable; maybe Google/FB has their reasons to effectively ban companies giving them hundreds of thousands to millions of $ / year (as these guys were and as we were). They are a commercial company and they can decide that and they do decide that. What the infuriating thing is, is the canned response communication. I cannot see that happen in many other business contexts in the world; if you are a $100k or more per year client, it seems totally insane that you get treated like that (actually; I'm not sure it's legal in some countries). The fact you cannot even call someone to just tell you what's up if completely weird. And the reason we will never depend on any 1 company for anything anymore.

This is smart advice always ofcourse, but, for instance, with adwords or adsense, for a long time you really didn't have a choice ; the rest is/was just garbage compared. Adwords has gone downhill a lot and this is good news for Facebook, Bing and others. Adsense still pays most for a lot of niches so a business just depending on ad sales will usually find it hard to diversify.

Now we used adwords for dating as well when Google just removed our ads for various reasons they never told us about (they didn't ban the account, they just told the ads would no longer run) and we did something which i'm not sure will still work but maybe it's worth investigating; we went 'local'; we found sites to advertise on and offline means in all parts of the country and got ads there (cheap) which turned out very effective. Especially on smaller local buy & sell sites / papers etc this returned far more than Google. A lot has changed so i'm not sure if it helps you any, but that's what we did and our profits jumped up with the added bonus that suddenly we had no dependency on Google anymore.

datingapps6• 12 years ago

Thanks, this is good insight and advice. I guess without Facebook our best hope is to think outside the box...So frustrating because we wouldn't have gone into this business had Facebook not been there - we counted on being able to advertise our business on Facebook. After all, we're a legal business, we don't try to pull shady tactics, just trying to build quality apps that people enjoy using. I would have never thought that being prevented from advertising on Facebook would be what will kill us.

aTMoZFeaR• 12 years ago

Try posting ads on Craigslist or Kijiji, that might help too.

ams6110• 12 years ago

When you swim in the muck, don't be surprised when you're treated like scum.

yuhong• 12 years ago

This is probably OT, but I certainly don't like that people have to post things like this anonymously

datingapps6• 12 years ago

Not OT. I wish I didn't have to either. I know many at FB read HN, and I don't want to make a bad situation even worse by getting singled out for blowing the whistle on this clearly unfair (and possibly illegal) situation.

turtle4• 12 years ago

The situation sucks for you, but there isn't anything remotely illegal about it, and it really isn't a matter of being unfair. They don't have a monopoly on online advertising, and they are free to make whatever business deals they want. Dating ads can be shady. They consider it less hassle for them to work with known entities for a premium price than try to work with every site out there. That's not a matter of fairness, it's just business.

It just sucks to be in the position you are with essentially no leverage in the relationship, and dependence on a single source of advertising. I think the other comments offer some insights on how to try to diversify. I don't think you have a real alternative beyond that.

Good luck!

mschaecher• 12 years ago

Are you managing your FB ads in house or via agency?

It sounds like in house, which I always highly recommend is best.

However, you might consider reaching out to one of the big FB ad partners like Nanigans. $100k+ account with known ROI, which means you'll ramp quick and advertise long term, will definitely get people drooling at those firms.

Because here's the issue:

While your situation is unfair, and your even allocation idea is great for the most part, it doesn't take into account the size of your competitor's ad budgets.

I'd be willing to bet Zoosk is somewhere in the range of $2M-$10M per year, or more, just on facebook alone. Probably similar amount on Google too.

At that level of spend, the executive level access and ad partner relationships on any advertising platform is a completely different world than yours.

I bet the head of marketing at Zoosk has Sheryl Sandberg's number in their phone and could get her on the line pretty much 24/7 if they REALLY needed too.

You're advocating with a dog whistle, while they have bull horns.

But the big ad platform partners have bull horns too.

And while obviously no one there is calling Sheryl on your behalf, even their regular day to day contacts at facebook are going to be way more influential than yours.

So it may be possible to piggyback off of them to get higher up the ladder.

If they can do that, just run through them until your big enough to have your own bull horn.

If they can't do anything for you because you're too small, you could try reaching out to other niche or regional dating advertisers that got the axe too(pry a ton that are pure desktop still too so even better).

Find ones with only a comfortable level of overlap to you guys and join up to bring all your individual accounts to the first platform that gets you unblocked.

Anyways, sucks and I feel ya, but hopefully some of that is useful.

PS - The 10% even allocation model you outlined is obviously ideal because it lets the market sort it out. But you also have to think about what that market mechanism would do to your business – a slower death. Big players can spend more and afford higher CPIs. They could just take all the oxygen out of the market for others until you die off.

datingapps6• 12 years ago

We've tried both in house and via agency (Fiksu). They've just relayed the message back to us that dating ads are now restricted. We will try reaching out to Nanigans, thanks for the tip.

I agree with you about the larger advertisers with the bull horns - but this isn't some local TV station - Facebook spent the last 5+ years building out a sophisticated self-serve ad platform for this very reason, which has been wildly successful for them. Have they lost all confidence in their ability for their platform to filter out racy boob pictures and the advertisers who push the envelope?

mcv• 12 years ago

If you've got that much money lying ready, why aren't you already hiring a lawyer to address this with whatever passes for a competition authority in the US?

Facebook is destroying my business. What can I do?

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