>Advertisers pay Facebook on the assumption that the people viewing and clicking their ads are real. But that’s often not the case.
Actually, advertisers already know there are lots of fake (Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat) accounts. Likewise, advertisers also know that newspaper & magazine circulation numbers are inflated (even though the circulation #s are "audited"). Ad buyers also know that tv audience sizes are inflated as well.
What matters in the end is if there's a positive ROI on the ad spending. The advertisers can measure the uptick on sales and if the ads worked, they renew their ad spend on Facebook. The majority of Facebook revenues come from repeat business of advertisers who already know about fake users. In contrast, if the majority of Facebook revenue were to come from 1st time ad buyers that were easily fooled by fake accounts, that's when the false user count would drastically affect revenue.
I'm the last person to defend Facebook but just wanted to highlight how advertisers think. For the Facebook ponzi scheme to fall apart, the ads have to stop working. This has happened before. In the 1990s, advertisers were buying Yahoo banner ads. But after the initial novelty of naive web surfers clicking on them, advertisers quickly realized banner ads were worthless. As a result, Yahoo revenues plunged.
"What matters in the end is if there's a positive ROI on the ad spending."
This would make logical sense. BUT! it turns to not be the case. Larger accounts: Pepsi, Johnson&Johnson, Tmobile, etc tend to just take a massive budget and blow it on ads. They don't necessarily care about the ROI or click tracking. They just want to shove banners in front of people's faces before the quarter ends. What is nuts -- is that these large accounts (we used to call it dumb money) are almost all of the ad revenue. Accounts that care about click ROI tend to be low budget -- that is why facebook/google will push these people into self service ad portals.
> What matters in the end is if there's a positive ROI on the ad spending
From what I've seen, the big brands don't really know the ROI of their ad spending. They allocate X% to digital, Y% to outdoor, Z% to TV, etc. Then they sub-allocate across channels within each category. It's not really about ROI.
And smaller advertisers don't have much in-house capability to measure ROI. Instead they rely on Facebook's own analytics.
Only a handful of companies I've seen actually build their own analytics, measure customer acquisition cost, and match acquisition cost to lifetime value for specific customer cohorts.
The smaller firms that do their own analytics invariably discover that 95% of the traffic from "paid social" Facebook ads is low quality, high churn, with deeply negative ROI. And it's impossible to isolate the 5% high quality, low churn, positive ROI traffic and just pay for that.
Ads that "work" are more a case of "can we show numbers that the people upstairs will consider ok?" than "can we prove these ads have contributed to our bottom line?".
The old "I know half of what I spend on advertising is wasted but the problem is I don't know which half" still applies, despite all the promises of digital advertising.
>For the Facebook ponzi scheme to fall apart, the ads have to stop working.
I am taking the Ponzi scheme here refers to numbers of users? Because for Facebook's Client, it is obvious that Ads is working and bringing a positive ROI. And these ROI are not paid out directly by Facebook ( which could easily distort the number ) but results measured through other channels. Which means from Facebook's clients perspective it is not a Ponzi scheme at all, as there is nothing to lose from its Client.
This was an interesting piece. The author pretty clearly states upfront that he's been criticizing MZ for years, which I found to be strangely refreshing as opposed to trying to claim a neutral position.
As far as the account fraud is concerned, I've wondered about this throughout the tech industry for pretty much my whole career. Most companies I've worked for have done all kinds of things to pad usage and retention stats in order to appease investors, ranging from ethically innocuous to "holy shit I need to start looking for a new gig". Online advertising in particular has been the worst at this in my professional experience.
What's being communicated to the advertiser isn't the whole truth: it's a selectively, surgically crafted subset of the truth. The first time I saw "The Big Short", I couldn't help but think about how similar the ad company I worked for behaved like the credit rating agencies. We knew that if our reporting showed that we were ineffective, we'd lose customers, so we did all kinds of things to make the reporting look good.
The accusation that one of the largest companies in the world is doing pretty much the same thing doesn't surprise me at all.
I have some knowledge of folks who have ad spend on facebook. For niche / targeting spend, facebook was totally amazing at least a year or two ago. The returns on facebook far surpassed the returns these companies saw elsewhere. I don't use facebook, so was surprised by that.
Do people really not evaluate return on ad spend against revenue?
In this case the client saw a direct link between marketing and revenue and I'm not sure why they would care if some of the views were from fake accounts. Views on the bus stop ad might be from someone homeless or other unlikely purchasers.
"Facebook reported advertising revenue at $16.6 billion for the final quarter of last year, up 30 percent year-over-year."
I guess all these companies are idiots for advertising on Instagram and facebook (I find this totally hard to believe)
Is there any independent audit of any advertising platform's data at all? Like Facebook tells me that 10,000 people saw my ads and I have no real way of verifying that. And I'm supposed to believe that Facebook is being honest even though Facebook has all the incentive to falsify numbers
The author claims to have invented Facebook, yet has presented no compelling evidence whatsoever for anything beyond "I did actually know Zuck when he created Facebook". He's not at all credible in my opinion.
It was all about the MAU, and that's not a GAAP metric. Evaluate the company based on your own metrics and make your own conclusions.
If this person wants to short facebook because they don't think it will maintain earnings 26 years or whatever P/E multiple it is currently trading at, that's fine.
The simple fact is that companies can grow and evolve. When Cisco got started, they sold switches. Eventually people stopped buying that switch, so they made a different one. Then they saw that people needed routers. And wifi. And teleconference.
FB is far from a static company with an unchanging platform - definitely not a ponzi scheme, unless you consider every company that funds current expenses with expected growth a ponzi scheme. I'm going to take a stance on the author; he is a nut job.
I don't see the evidence here as being compelling at all.
Even if you could prove that Facebook is filling the gaps between new users and churned users by creating fake accounts, you also have to draw a line between those fake accounts and the company's bottom line.
Fake accounts don't buy products, so if advertisers are making decisions off of CAC, numbers potentially inflated by fake accounts (reach, clicks, engagement, etc.) are secondary.
Facebook's ad power comes from their egregious data collection and lack of privacy concerns. The more they know about you, the more relevant your ads will be and the more likely someone seeing your ad will be to buy. And if advertisers can draw a line that says "if I spend $50 on Facebook ads, I'll increase my bottom-line line $100", they'll spend money until it's no longer profitable to do so.
That said, it's not like all Facebook advertisers are acting rationally in that manner. I don't know what % of Facebook revenue to coming from unsophisticated advertisers, so it's possible that they could be making a lot of money from people focusing on fuzzy metrics like reach.
> The more they know about you, the more relevant your ads will be and the more likely someone seeing your ad will be to buy
How much ACTUAL evidence is there for this?
Take Amazon for instance... they know everything I have bought from them ever and employ some mega-smart people but the number of times I buy something and they then recommend either absolute shite or the same damn thing is not an insignificant number.
Another thing is if I am an advertiser and FB says "your ad was seen by 20 million people", how can I dispute this? It's a closed system.
I am sorry... but from my comfy armchair position I'm calling shenanigans on mass-data collection in advertising being able to move the profitability needle in a measurable way.
Imagine you're Coca-Cola. You have an on-line ad budget for this quarter. Where should you spend it? Probably the places that have the most reach: Google and Facebook. Do you know how many cans of Coke or other drink brands you will sell based on these ads this quarter? No. Is there any way for you to figure it out? No. All you know are the numbers Facebook tells you. And those numbers look pretty good. This is how "sophisticated" ad buyers work.
It's actually far easier for a tiny business to measure the conversation rate between clicks and actual purchases. Big ad buyers throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and they rarely bother truly measuring because that's often impossible.
The entire ad industry is based on fuzzy metrics. Within that fuzz is an awful lot of room for fraud.
It's important to understand that Greenspan (who, incidentally, comments on hacker news a fair bit as https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thinkcomp and submitted this link) is not an unbiased observer here. He's had an ongoing feud with Zuck/FB for years and years and years.
From reading his writings on this, and other topics, it's clear that he is extremely bitter about virtually all things related to Facebook.
He also undertook a multi-year quixotic series of lawsuits against California and other entities over what he felt were unfair regulations on money services businesses.
Lying to advertisers would not make Facebook a ponzi scheme. A ponzi scheme is when early investors get paid with "profits" that are actually later investors' money.
No one is doubting that Facebook is making genuine revenue, although they may be misleading people to earn that revenue.
early investors get paid with "profits" that are actually later investors' money
But seriously, that's actually what happens in the real world in % of "successful" startups. I think context is important in pointing to something as a ponzi scheme
About a year ago we had to pretty much shut down FB advertising as we simply could not come close to rectifying the click numbers they were reporting to us. That trust broke down much further when you considered conversions and more human-like activity down our funnels.
That said, for another business, FB is absolutely killing it for us.
The difference is in target market size and niche.
Which is the bit I don't get. Even if FB say they have a trillion users, so what. Advertisers will advertise and pay based on the results they are seeing just like you did.
Eric Schmidt made pretty much the same point about Google fake clicks.
Granted this is trickier if you don't have an easy way to determine if your advert has converted to a result e.g. somebody who is just looking to raise brand awareness.
Jeah, tried several times. With several different pictures, text, angle, color, font etc to advertise on facebook. 11k views one click or no click mostly lol.
I guess it is too niche. (African bangles and stuff, hand made)
Really enjoyed the article, but have to point out the obvious: Fraud =/= Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes are a payout model where money from later investors is used to pay off earlier investors.
There are so many ways in which I'd like to contradict this article, but I'll stick to just one.
> While they reveal a problem escalating at an alarming rate and are constantly being revised upward .. in Q2 2017
In Q4 2017 the method for measuring the prevalence of fake accounts was changed to something more accurate. The number of fake accounts wasn't "escalating at an alarming rate", it was comparable to the number in the previous quarter.
> fake account problem … Google Trends shows worldwide "Facebook" queries down 80% from their November 2012 peak.
Except that much of this downturn in people googling "Facebook" is explainable by the shift to mobile. Surely no one needs to Google "Facebook" to open the Facebook app on their phone’s home screen. (For that matter, one doesn't even need the app icon when one is receiving push notifications from FB. No legit notifs? No problem, FB will synthesize fake ones.)
Misleading title, weak arguments, no evidence. Just click bait . Facebook saw huge growth since 2012 by acquiring Instagram and monetizing mobile, and also from increased advertising. Facebook does not need more accounts to grow, but rather by making more money from existing users.Terrible article.
At the risk of sounding like a devil's advocate (that isn't my intention), if there really were this much fraud, wouldn't it shake out in the economics? i.e. if you aren't getting your money's worth from the Facebook ads you're buying, wouldn't you notice?
Advertising is an arms race with your competitors, so it is difficult to assign a fixed price to it - you simply need to be spending roughly as much as your competitors are.
Somewhat similarly, on the matter of choosing between alternative advertising platforms, the uncertainties surrounding the quality of their products makes it difficult to choose between them, so people can be inclined to simply go with heuristic measures like a known brand (i.e. Facebook).
I was getting a half dozen obviously fake friend requests on IG every day until I set my account to private. These were invariably users like “TatianaXXX6969” or “SexySvetlana1727288”. Seems like the easiest kind of fake account to block (so much for AI and ML). I deleted my FB two years ago and I think IG is next.
Interesting to discover the author is a classmate of Zuckerbro and claims to have invented Facebook. Which seems to have led to a career of writing articles like these.
Excluding the personal attacks, which dilute what would have been a good alternative look at Facebook, I suggest everyone interested in this topic to look at the other parts that make up the click-fraud industry:
- Clickfarms in China that have shady people using some automation and thousands of smartphones to perform fake clicks for the Chinese ad market
- Pied Piper style farms with people in poor countries sitting all day creating accounts (it was exaggerated in the series)
- The ad giants constant "battle" with click-fraud
- Shady tactics used by smaller app/websites to get people to accidentally click on ads
I wouldn't personally denounce all online advertising though. It has its place the same way print media advertising does. It's market-value is questionable though (which is derived from questionable "effectiveness" sales pitches we're told about online advertising)
The author seems to be talking up his portfolio. Although there may be truth to this article, it seems the author is attempting to move the stock price with negitive press.
He keeps referencing total number of user accounts. This is a bad number to track, precisely because of fraud, duplicate, and unused accounts. A better number is something like monthly or daily active users. Then you can randomly sample a subset of these users and manually determine the number of fake accounts to give you a confidence interval on the total number of real daily active users, which for investor/shareholder purposes, is much better to use than total accounts anyway.
I go into more detail in the report I wrote in January, which also points out that the perfectly constant DAU/MAU relationship Facebook reports cannot possibly be true as growth continues to slow/reverse. See https://www.plainsite.org/realitycheck/facebook.html.
Time will tell whether the author, Aaron Greenspan, who knew and interacted with Zuckerberg at Harvard, is right or wrong. Given the lack of good, transparent data, it's hard for me to judge the prevalence of ad fraud. I suspect it's hard for many ad buyers too.
In the meantime, the OP and comments here remind me of the reaction of a media executive, Mel Karmazin, upon realizing, back in 2003, that Google could measure the effectiveness of advertising:
> Karmazin and the networks continued to charge steep rates because, Karmazin says, "advertisers don't know what works and what doesn't. That's a great model." But it's a model, the Google executives told him, that is horribly inefficient. Karmazin, before departing, trained his eyes on his Google hosts and blurted, only half in jest, "You're fucking with the magic!"[a]
Perhaps new media companies like Facebook have come to the realization that they too should not be "fucking with the magic," to use Karmazin's colorful language.
[+] [-] jasode|6 years ago|reply
Actually, advertisers already know there are lots of fake (Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat) accounts. Likewise, advertisers also know that newspaper & magazine circulation numbers are inflated (even though the circulation #s are "audited"). Ad buyers also know that tv audience sizes are inflated as well.
What matters in the end is if there's a positive ROI on the ad spending. The advertisers can measure the uptick on sales and if the ads worked, they renew their ad spend on Facebook. The majority of Facebook revenues come from repeat business of advertisers who already know about fake users. In contrast, if the majority of Facebook revenue were to come from 1st time ad buyers that were easily fooled by fake accounts, that's when the false user count would drastically affect revenue.
I'm the last person to defend Facebook but just wanted to highlight how advertisers think. For the Facebook ponzi scheme to fall apart, the ads have to stop working. This has happened before. In the 1990s, advertisers were buying Yahoo banner ads. But after the initial novelty of naive web surfers clicking on them, advertisers quickly realized banner ads were worthless. As a result, Yahoo revenues plunged.
[+] [-] ransom1538|6 years ago|reply
This would make logical sense. BUT! it turns to not be the case. Larger accounts: Pepsi, Johnson&Johnson, Tmobile, etc tend to just take a massive budget and blow it on ads. They don't necessarily care about the ROI or click tracking. They just want to shove banners in front of people's faces before the quarter ends. What is nuts -- is that these large accounts (we used to call it dumb money) are almost all of the ad revenue. Accounts that care about click ROI tend to be low budget -- that is why facebook/google will push these people into self service ad portals.
[+] [-] panarky|6 years ago|reply
From what I've seen, the big brands don't really know the ROI of their ad spending. They allocate X% to digital, Y% to outdoor, Z% to TV, etc. Then they sub-allocate across channels within each category. It's not really about ROI.
And smaller advertisers don't have much in-house capability to measure ROI. Instead they rely on Facebook's own analytics.
Only a handful of companies I've seen actually build their own analytics, measure customer acquisition cost, and match acquisition cost to lifetime value for specific customer cohorts.
The smaller firms that do their own analytics invariably discover that 95% of the traffic from "paid social" Facebook ads is low quality, high churn, with deeply negative ROI. And it's impossible to isolate the 5% high quality, low churn, positive ROI traffic and just pay for that.
[+] [-] LaundroMat|6 years ago|reply
The old "I know half of what I spend on advertising is wasted but the problem is I don't know which half" still applies, despite all the promises of digital advertising.
[+] [-] scandox|6 years ago|reply
Often even when the advertising account is directly held by the advertiser there is an intermediary managing the ad spend.
And the intermediary is incentizived to spin the numbers as best they can.
[+] [-] ksec|6 years ago|reply
I am taking the Ponzi scheme here refers to numbers of users? Because for Facebook's Client, it is obvious that Ads is working and bringing a positive ROI. And these ROI are not paid out directly by Facebook ( which could easily distort the number ) but results measured through other channels. Which means from Facebook's clients perspective it is not a Ponzi scheme at all, as there is nothing to lose from its Client.
[+] [-] save_ferris|6 years ago|reply
As far as the account fraud is concerned, I've wondered about this throughout the tech industry for pretty much my whole career. Most companies I've worked for have done all kinds of things to pad usage and retention stats in order to appease investors, ranging from ethically innocuous to "holy shit I need to start looking for a new gig". Online advertising in particular has been the worst at this in my professional experience.
What's being communicated to the advertiser isn't the whole truth: it's a selectively, surgically crafted subset of the truth. The first time I saw "The Big Short", I couldn't help but think about how similar the ad company I worked for behaved like the credit rating agencies. We knew that if our reporting showed that we were ineffective, we'd lose customers, so we did all kinds of things to make the reporting look good.
The accusation that one of the largest companies in the world is doing pretty much the same thing doesn't surprise me at all.
[+] [-] privateSFacct|6 years ago|reply
Do people really not evaluate return on ad spend against revenue?
In this case the client saw a direct link between marketing and revenue and I'm not sure why they would care if some of the views were from fake accounts. Views on the bus stop ad might be from someone homeless or other unlikely purchasers.
"Facebook reported advertising revenue at $16.6 billion for the final quarter of last year, up 30 percent year-over-year."
I guess all these companies are idiots for advertising on Instagram and facebook (I find this totally hard to believe)
[+] [-] puranjay|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_watcher|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blobbers|6 years ago|reply
If this person wants to short facebook because they don't think it will maintain earnings 26 years or whatever P/E multiple it is currently trading at, that's fine.
The simple fact is that companies can grow and evolve. When Cisco got started, they sold switches. Eventually people stopped buying that switch, so they made a different one. Then they saw that people needed routers. And wifi. And teleconference.
FB is far from a static company with an unchanging platform - definitely not a ponzi scheme, unless you consider every company that funds current expenses with expected growth a ponzi scheme. I'm going to take a stance on the author; he is a nut job.
[+] [-] tabtab|6 years ago|reply
My violin for investors getting screwed is much smaller than that for consumers getting screwed. (Oh wait, I have Amazon stock. Crap!)
[+] [-] sharadov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssharp|6 years ago|reply
Even if you could prove that Facebook is filling the gaps between new users and churned users by creating fake accounts, you also have to draw a line between those fake accounts and the company's bottom line.
Fake accounts don't buy products, so if advertisers are making decisions off of CAC, numbers potentially inflated by fake accounts (reach, clicks, engagement, etc.) are secondary.
Facebook's ad power comes from their egregious data collection and lack of privacy concerns. The more they know about you, the more relevant your ads will be and the more likely someone seeing your ad will be to buy. And if advertisers can draw a line that says "if I spend $50 on Facebook ads, I'll increase my bottom-line line $100", they'll spend money until it's no longer profitable to do so.
That said, it's not like all Facebook advertisers are acting rationally in that manner. I don't know what % of Facebook revenue to coming from unsophisticated advertisers, so it's possible that they could be making a lot of money from people focusing on fuzzy metrics like reach.
[+] [-] _Understated_|6 years ago|reply
How much ACTUAL evidence is there for this?
Take Amazon for instance... they know everything I have bought from them ever and employ some mega-smart people but the number of times I buy something and they then recommend either absolute shite or the same damn thing is not an insignificant number.
Another thing is if I am an advertiser and FB says "your ad was seen by 20 million people", how can I dispute this? It's a closed system.
I am sorry... but from my comfy armchair position I'm calling shenanigans on mass-data collection in advertising being able to move the profitability needle in a measurable way.
Edit: Added a bit more stuff
[+] [-] philistine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkcomp|6 years ago|reply
Imagine you're Coca-Cola. You have an on-line ad budget for this quarter. Where should you spend it? Probably the places that have the most reach: Google and Facebook. Do you know how many cans of Coke or other drink brands you will sell based on these ads this quarter? No. Is there any way for you to figure it out? No. All you know are the numbers Facebook tells you. And those numbers look pretty good. This is how "sophisticated" ad buyers work.
It's actually far easier for a tiny business to measure the conversation rate between clicks and actual purchases. Big ad buyers throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and they rarely bother truly measuring because that's often impossible.
The entire ad industry is based on fuzzy metrics. Within that fuzz is an awful lot of room for fraud.
[+] [-] blazespin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astrodust|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harryh|6 years ago|reply
From reading his writings on this, and other topics, it's clear that he is extremely bitter about virtually all things related to Facebook.
See this from over a decade ago: https://venturebeat.com/2007/09/02/who-founded-facebook-aaro...
He also undertook a multi-year quixotic series of lawsuits against California and other entities over what he felt were unfair regulations on money services businesses.
https://www.upcounsel.com/blog/aaron-greenspan-versus-silico...
[+] [-] mrfredward|6 years ago|reply
No one is doubting that Facebook is making genuine revenue, although they may be misleading people to earn that revenue.
[+] [-] weego|6 years ago|reply
But seriously, that's actually what happens in the real world in % of "successful" startups. I think context is important in pointing to something as a ponzi scheme
[+] [-] blaser-waffle|6 years ago|reply
That would just be Fraud. And on a long enough timeline, publicly traded companies may eventually come to that point.
[+] [-] DisruptiveDave|6 years ago|reply
That said, for another business, FB is absolutely killing it for us.
The difference is in target market size and niche.
[+] [-] thinkloop|6 years ago|reply
Are the target market size and niche smaller or bigger for the one that works?
[+] [-] PMan74|6 years ago|reply
Eric Schmidt made pretty much the same point about Google fake clicks.
https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2058286/eric-schmidt-...
Granted this is trickier if you don't have an easy way to determine if your advert has converted to a result e.g. somebody who is just looking to raise brand awareness.
[+] [-] Bombthecat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjkennedy98|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blacksqr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nindalf|6 years ago|reply
> While they reveal a problem escalating at an alarming rate and are constantly being revised upward .. in Q2 2017
In Q4 2017 the method for measuring the prevalence of fake accounts was changed to something more accurate. The number of fake accounts wasn't "escalating at an alarming rate", it was comparable to the number in the previous quarter.
Source: I worked on that change.
[+] [-] malloreon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulgb|6 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/technology/01facebook.htm...
[+] [-] neilv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seltzered_|6 years ago|reply
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook%20ponzi&sort=byPopula...
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alanh|6 years ago|reply
> fake account problem … Google Trends shows worldwide "Facebook" queries down 80% from their November 2012 peak.
Except that much of this downturn in people googling "Facebook" is explainable by the shift to mobile. Surely no one needs to Google "Facebook" to open the Facebook app on their phone’s home screen. (For that matter, one doesn't even need the app icon when one is receiving push notifications from FB. No legit notifs? No problem, FB will synthesize fake ones.)
[+] [-] paulpauper|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anm89|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _bxg1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrow84|6 years ago|reply
Somewhat similarly, on the matter of choosing between alternative advertising platforms, the uncertainties surrounding the quality of their products makes it difficult to choose between them, so people can be inclined to simply go with heuristic measures like a known brand (i.e. Facebook).
[+] [-] thinkcomp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoblePublius|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sindrome|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harryh|6 years ago|reply
https://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-announces-settlement...
[+] [-] phantom_oracle|6 years ago|reply
- Clickfarms in China that have shady people using some automation and thousands of smartphones to perform fake clicks for the Chinese ad market
- Pied Piper style farms with people in poor countries sitting all day creating accounts (it was exaggerated in the series)
- The ad giants constant "battle" with click-fraud
- Shady tactics used by smaller app/websites to get people to accidentally click on ads
I wouldn't personally denounce all online advertising though. It has its place the same way print media advertising does. It's market-value is questionable though (which is derived from questionable "effectiveness" sales pitches we're told about online advertising)
[+] [-] aaronarduino|6 years ago|reply
The author seems to be talking up his portfolio. Although there may be truth to this article, it seems the author is attempting to move the stock price with negitive press.
[+] [-] icebraining|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway713|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkcomp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs702|6 years ago|reply
In the meantime, the OP and comments here remind me of the reaction of a media executive, Mel Karmazin, upon realizing, back in 2003, that Google could measure the effectiveness of advertising:
> Karmazin and the networks continued to charge steep rates because, Karmazin says, "advertisers don't know what works and what doesn't. That's a great model." But it's a model, the Google executives told him, that is horribly inefficient. Karmazin, before departing, trained his eyes on his Google hosts and blurted, only half in jest, "You're fucking with the magic!"[a]
Perhaps new media companies like Facebook have come to the realization that they too should not be "fucking with the magic," to use Karmazin's colorful language.
--
[a] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120389...