[sean_patel]

> Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar?

Yeah. It's called "Facebook Fraud". See a real live experiment someone did, to figure out the true reach and ROI on Facebook Advertizing. => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag I too did a similar experiment using a pre-paid Visa card (for 50$) so that FB doesn't keep charging my Credit Card and/or lets it get stolen from bad security practices. My results were similar to the guy in the Youtube Video.

Facebook's likes and "reach" are mostly automated or from in-house click-farms in South-east asia (think India, Vietnam, Phillipines etc)

[vacri]

That video is well worth a watch, but to summarise it: the channel owner's users are predominantly first-world and engage with his channel to some degree. He purchased FB advertising to promote his channel, and got a huge amount of traffic 'from' third-world locations that didn't engage (leave comments, etc) and that came from content-free FB accounts that liked hundreds to thousands of FB pages with no particular pattern.

Couldn't be more obviously a scam if it was twirling a waxed moustache.

[asdfasdfa11112]

I've had this experience as well. I'd love an opportunity to chat with someone who runs these click farms for a living, so I can understand their motivations a little more clearly.

I can't wrap my head around why someone would run a bot farm to click on my FB ads. It's not like AdSense, where they're getting a cut. I've read a theory it's to hide the bot accounts from Facebook's bot-detectors. But if people like in your experience can easily ID the obviously fake accounts, FB can (using the same criteria you mentioned).

I get FB has moral hazard to allow bot clicks, because they get paid. But if they're so sophisticated as to require fake engagement on ads (which is why I care -- I'm getting charged!), wouldn't they also be monitoring the simple heuristic you provided?

This could be explained by Facebook requiring bots to make them money to not get banned, but I don't think there's sufficient evidence for such a conspiracy just yet.

In the end, all I care about is how much I put into FB ads, and how much directly attributable revenue that generates. The fraud might hide otherwise profitable campaigns (ones that don't break even), but frequently this isn't the primary concern. (My concerns are usually, "does this part of Lake Facebook have any fish I can catch?", followed by the step 2 of optimizing the campaign to get a positive ROI.

[Smirnoff]

Like someone below said bots are more complicated than just clicking on what brings them money.

In order to be not detected as bots, they need to behave like humans. Hence, they like and visit websites that they have no special interest in. Think of it this way: 50% of what they click is just something random, other 50% is what their masters programmed them to do.

This really doesn't have to do anything with Facebook. There are companies in Russia and India that sell likes, follows, etc. These bots then have to fake their identity and as a result they like stuff that you pay for as Facebook advertiser. I am sure Facebook does something to mitigate this and block the bots but it's a never-ending game for them and those who sell fake like/follows/etc.

[Laforet]

The click farms are a bit more sophisticated than that. Follows and likes are priced based on the level of human intervention: simple bots are cheap but less persistent since they are easy to distinguish from organic traffic. Fake accounts created manually are much harder to detect.

[hugodahl]

"Couldn't be more obviously a scam if it was twirling a waxed moustache." I am absolutely going to use this at the earliest possible situation!

[emef]

A potential solution for facebook (if they were inclined) might be to not charge for likes from accounts less than N days old or from accounts with > M total page likes. At least this would make it harder for click farms to get around... or, ya know, try and model click-farm accounts which seems pretty tractable.

[sean_patel]

> A potential solution for Facebook

Sorry, but Facebook is not looking for a solution. I should've made it clearer in my response, that the like and click farms are managed by Facebook themselves.

They (the Ads Team) moved the click-farms and fake likes in-house after discovering other shady companies that were doing this. Then I think they realized how lucrative it was to their share price and quarterly revenues bottom-line so they went with it.

[Griffinsauce]

Why the heck would FB run their own click farms? They own the database... They could generate clicks at will. This is the dumbest conspiracy theory I've seen in a while.

[shermanyo]

Technically, it wasn't FB, it was Jared doing it secretly, until he was caught by Richard. They tried to keep it secret, but Dinesh and Gilfoyle eventually realized where the uptick in users came from. Dinesh _did_ then offer Richard a program to do just that, edit the databases directly...

Man, I can't wait for Silicon Valley to come back next season lol

[arde]

Running a click farm instead of editing the database would be the sensible thing to do when trying to keep the operation secret. That way, people inside FB would not know about the fraud.

[JeremyBanks]

That's a pretty extreme claim. Is there any evidence?

[sean_patel]

Yes. See my other comments and evidence (the most I could provide without getting in trouble). I worked at the Ads Team as a Contractor.

[dx034]

Just because you get a lot of clicks from Asia, it doesn't mean that they have click farms there. Don't know if you've been to Southeast Asia, but there are a lot of people and most of them use Facebook. If they see the ad they might click it because they're interested, even though they cannot buy the product because they're in the wrong country. Still doesn't mean that FB fakes clicks, it just means they target them badly.

And even if the accounts are fake, they were likely created to sell followers/likes, not to click ads. Clicking on things just shows activity.

[sean_patel]

I'm sorry I can't really get into a discussion with you (or anyone else) without getting into serious NDA violations.