Big Tech and advertising: the con is being revealed

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6 thoughts on “Big Tech and advertising: the con is being revealed

  1. I’d add something. A few years ago when I did some advertising to sell our business in Melbourne we put some adds up on Facebook. Those adds were restricted to;

    1. Melbourne and environs.
    2. Australia.

    The only enquiries for this business we received from Facebook were from third world countries in Asia & Africa (can probably find the screen snaps if you want them). I also know from conversations with others that they’ve experienced the same thing. I suspect that there will be class action against Facebook for this hopefully soon. I think they’re well aware of it, in fact I’m not sure that it’s not part of their business model, and just don’t care. Which tells you everything you need to know about this social media ‘business’.

  2. Thank you, Richard. Your experience is not unlike the case that Veritasium uncovered. They made an experimental page, and went through Facebook, as opposed to an illegitimate click farm, to get likes. The result: they had likes from bots and click farms. Here’s a post I wrote about this back in 2014, along with a link to Veritasium’s video.

  3. Thanks Jack, I just learnt a little by watching that video. Although in our case as all interaction was third world my view is that they were Facebook click farms not accidental hiding of tracks.

    But it seems better to have 500 customers gained organically than 3000 customers gained during an advertising campaign.

    We’ve never gained anything by advertising on Facebook. One other use of click farms, which we’ve experienced, is that competitors can used them to diss your business.

  4. I imagine it’s in Facebook’s interest to run their own click farms—they are a dodgy bunch. And the more click farms they have, the more people think they have to pay to boost their posts to reach the same number of legitimate users they once did.
       I agree, a legitimately and organically gained 500 beat a paid 3,000 any day.
       Competitors’ dissing is why I don’t like Google My Business, either. I see way too much potential for abuse. Anyone can ruin your hard-earned reputation anonymously.

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