10 Comments »Last night Facebook took aggressive action to stop the increased level of application Facebooks ads that are in violation of Facebook’s terms by shutting down SocialReach. As I’ve been covering for the past few days, the volume of spam ads on Facebook have been increasing over the past few weeks. Some developers have even been reporting substantial jumps in revenue from these ad networks which is understandable considering how aggressive the ads are. Around midnight last night the company sent out the following letter to all publishers:
Monday, June 8th, 2009
Facebook Publishers:
Due to circumstances beyond our control we are being forced to
temporarily pause our advertisements on the Facebook platform.Please remove our ad tags from all of your Facebook applications by
9pm PST tonight.We apologize for the short notice however this is beyond our control
and we hope to continue Facebook operations again in the near future.Note: We will still be accepting traffic from all other sites.
–
Phillip H
Director of Sales & Business Development
SocialReach, LP
Update
We’ve also been notified that SocialHour was shut down. Both companies have been the most aggressive ad networks on the platform and we’ve been expecting Facebook to take some sort of action. Last week after posting about the rise in aggressive ads, Facebook notified us, stating that, “We’ve received some reports of deceptive content in ads placed within apps by developers. These ads are not from Facebook but we are concerned about any potential threat to our users’ experience. We have already had the ads removed from a number of apps. We are continuing to investigate to make sure these ads stay off Facebook and may take further action against developers who host the ads.”
Facebook recently updated their advertising guidelines to include the following statement which may be part of the reason behind the surge in aggressive ads:
Subscription Services
- The advertisement of Subscription Services must comply with the conditions noted below and as determined by Facebook in its sole discretion. “Subscription Services” may include sites that promote downloading ringtones, wallpaper, or text messages for predictions, love life advice, news, personality quizzes, or other entertainment services or any site that induces a user to sign up for recurring billing of a product or service.
Some have been pointing us toward aggressive advertisements that are running on Facebook. We haven’t been able to confirm this yet though so we’ll be sure to post if we have an update. We’ll be reaching out to Facebook for more information on the ad networks being banned and will update this post with anything we hear back.
Great work…. Keep removing all the deceptive ads from the internet and watch how no one will make a dollar. Basic marketing practices have included some form of deception since the beginning of time. Are you going to write an article on the Slap-Chop for not perfectly cutting your salad, or Publishers Clearing House for forcing all those old folks into magazine subscriptions??? The bottom line is that aggressively targeting ad networks and advertisers isn’t good for anyone. We are in the middle of a recession and any attempt at negatively impacting the online world is truly an attack on the growth of our platform. I understand you think you are making a positive difference, but think about the number of jobs, revenue and pain you just caused numerous companies.
This is great news in the form that FB is out there, somewhere, taking action. Now they need to take action against apps themself.
As founder and general manager of Adknowledge’s Cubics, I applaud Facebook’s action on this front. Facebook has had policies regarding ad content and user experience in place for some time and many ad networks have completely ignored the rules to deceive users and temporarily increase profits. These actions have, in many cases, decreased the overall usage of Facebook & Facebook applications and, in the long term, have resulted in applications earning less.
While the Cubics network does run some of the now famous “IQ Quiz” ads, we provide all publishers with a set of tools so they can have control over which ads are shown on their application. More on the tool here: http://cubicsdev.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-content-filtering.html
As mentioned in the post above, removing these ads does affect earnings, but Adknowledge/Cubics is not reliant upon these offers like other ad networks.
Dwayne Lafleur
Great news!
I didnt realize that Facebook was the newly appointed web sheriff. I understand that they need to protect users from malicious ads, but I saw these ads all the time, and never once thought anything was wrong with them, in fact, I thought they were beyond innovative.
Its a shame that Facebook is stifling innovation instead of encouraging it. If they were any good at monetizing ad inventory you would think they would do it themselves, but since they cant, there is no reason to shut down the guys who can.
I agree with Dan, consumers are responsible for their own destiny. If they are not smart enough to realize that double opting into a cell phone offer costs money, then thats their problem, not the adnetwork.
Good work Facebook (and Nick, and AllFacebook).
Ads designed to deceive users are and always have been a negative business model that is only putting short term gains ahead of long-term smarts. As the rise of ads and sites that use Facebook-esque colours etc rises, the more users become inclined to not click on any kind of advertising or application after a while. And so we all lose.
i wonder when tatto media will get banned as well
It looks like facebook turned them back on
I am seeing a lot of ads for IQ quizzes with my freinds in them. I think this just shows facebook want money bc they were probably losing a lot without these ads running.
Facebook User, you’re correct - I just checked and SocialReach is again displaying ads. The ads are a bit modified to placate some of Facebook’s concerns, but on the backend, SocialReach ads are still requesting detailed user information with the session information of the application hosting the ads. I’m a bit flabbergasted, to be honest.
Dan, you’re an idiot. Those scammers are nothing more than parasites on society. If we took all the scammers and con-artists in the country, dragged them out in the street and shot them in the back of the head, society would continue to go on just fine, producing at the same level.