Flyer Exchange Overloads Cubics

Posted by Nick O'Neill on October 8th, 2007 2:53 PM

A few days ago I covered Facebook making changes to the platform that would eliminate the Flyer Exchange application. The Flyer exchange application successfully exploited absolute positioning with CSS. It now appears that this is not the only thing they have exploited. According to an extremely active discussion thread on Facebook, the Flyer Exchange has hidden 9 ads under their fliers.

As a result, the Cubics platform has had extremely slow response times similar to those that you would see under a denial of service attack. As pictured below, the top three advertisers alone have in excess of 3.4 million impressions, resulting in over 30 million calls to the Cubics servers. Since the issue was revealed, the developers of Flyer Exchange have removed the Cubics code from their application.

I found the click-thru rates of the top fliers to be particularly interesting. If Facebook flyers provides a similar click-thru rate, this model is an extremely poor business model. Back in July, I said that Facebook may have a click-thru rate of around 0.04%. The Flyer Exchange application seems to be producing similar results. While I’m no statistician, there is probably a strong correlation between click-thru rates on the Flyer Exchange application and the Facebook Flyers solution.

Top Flyer Exchange Advertisers

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 2:53 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.