Any Facebook developer that’s been around for the past couple years will remember the days of Appsaholic, SocialMedia’s tool which tracked the traffic of applications across the platform. Since then, a number of services have come and gone and now we even track the statistics of a large percentage of the applications on the platform. While I haven’t personally been back to Appsaholic recently, one developer suggested I visit the application again. The findings were slightly surprising, only because of the history behind the application.
Whoever is currently running the application has displayed a list of instances where Facebook’s ad approval department approved ads which were in violation of the terms. While many of them still are questionable, it’s there to make a point: If Facebook is going to get aggressive on application developers for questionable advertisements, they should follow a similar policy.
One of the advertisements leads to an IQ quiz, something Facebook appears to be trying to remove recently, however I’m not sure when the advertisement was originally posted. Whether or not aggressive advertisements make it through Facebook’s ad approval team is not really the question here. Instead, one has to wonder who released this page and why they did so. SocialMedia has shifted their focus from running their own inventory to serving social ad units.
While the change is a subtle one, the company has been forced to shift its focus as the display advertising play on the Facebook platform hasn’t been that effective. So would the company launch this page to simply complain about Facebook’s actions that have forced CPMs down and have pushed developers to get more creative with their monetization strategies? Possibly, but I can’t say definitively that the application is still hosted by SocialMedia because the domain where the images are hosted (“mdotm.com”) is privately registered.
Despite the private registration, the domain appears to be hosted at the same location as SocialMedia based on a simple traceroute command. If the new application is in fact hosted by SocialMedia, it’s a clear sign of the company’s frustration with Facebook’s latest policy enforcements. Yes, some ads include aggressive landing pages, however there appears to be a grey area and enforcement is somewhat arbitrary. Most importantly, Facebook is trying to clean up the ads as quickly as possible.
There are plenty of developers that are still frustrated though and this latest change to the Appsaholic application illustrates many developers’ thoughts. The terms need to be clear and Facebook needs to clearly articulate what ads they’d like running in order for the platform to be a stable environment for ad supported applications.
It should also be noted that some of the ad networks that were being shut down were showing 10 percent to more than 50 percent of ads that were in violation of Facebook’s terms. Comparing such ad networks on equal footing to Facebook which also runs billions of ad impressions daily, is not completely fair. Facebook attempts to filter through ads whereas some of these ad networks on the platform are making a business out of deceptive advertisements.
Update
As posted in the comments, Sourabh Niyogi, a co-founder of SocialMedia, developed this application. Apparently he had sent me an email earlier in the week however I just saw it yesterday evening. You can read his comment for clarification, however it’s still clear what the app is being used for!
Obviously, you knew the page was written by me, but you decided to create an aura of mystery about it intentionally — clever blogging tactic!
I cofounded socialmedia and wrote Appsaholic in 2007 but it was retired as a brand and app at the end of 2007. I stopped formally working for Socialmedia in 2008, but I try to be useful as an outsider. The opinions, if you can call anything in that page an “opinion”, are mine, and are no more than a blog post to stimulate debate over a very serious point. I speak for myself only, but enough about me, here are facts:
1. Facebook ad guidelines have been unclear and have changed over time for reasons that have never been understood (what was once not ok becomes ok, and what was ok becomes not ok suddenly)
2. Facebook ads have been poorly policed (new ad networks emerge with more aggressive tactics)
3. Facebook policy team is authoritarian in its warning, suspending and banning ad networks (real cases exist)
4. Facebook policy was not even followed by Facebook itself (as the “quiz” illustrates, in not just one instance but many. How many, is unclear.)
I think (1)-(3) are widely known but (4) was not. I was prompted by recent suspensions of (3) to figure out what the new boundary was: it turned out there is no boundary. After seeing no such boundary, it became clear that Facebook ads are definitely not higher quality than socialmedia or anyone else — its pretty much the same mix of stuff. So this holier than thou attitude the “policy team” gives ad networks and developers with warnings, suspensions in the name of “user experience” … it may have started out that way with the best of intentions, but now its just a facade.
While many of us would like to dismiss Facebook apps as silly little things to pass our time, a lot of peoples livelihoods, jobs, startups success (socialmedia included, obviously) now depend on this ecosystem now. A lot of us pour a lot of life into it. Its not a small thing to let the random and inconsistent acts of hypocrites and authoritarians decide this on a whim, but that is exactly what is happening. One end result is that ad networks (both banner and virtual currency) will be reduced to commodities with zero differentiation except on this vague notion of compliance. But there are probably a lot more.
Some say “well, its their platform, they can be hypocrites and authoritarians on their own platform, if you don’t like it, leave”. And some will do just that.
Comment by Sourabh Niyogi — October 8, 2009 @ 1:35 am