Last night Facebook restated their commitment to fighting off aggressive advertisers and as part of that commitment they have shut down two more ad networks which continue to violate the platform terms. Unfortunately we have no idea which ad networks they shut down and even after talking to multiple sources we have yet to uncover who those networks are. Perhaps the people who were shut down are irrelevant, but as I wrote at the beginning of the week, casualties were inevitable.
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To see the ongoing conversation about aggressive online advertising is both reassuring as well as disconcerting. The reason that it’s disconcerting is that Mike Arrington has just begun to breach a much greater issue by randomly attacking one (or a couple) companies in this space. If this attack was done just for page views then writing about the issues are almost as bad as the people performing the act.
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There’s a running “joke” among industry insiders about one of the ad network companies, who’s founders need bodyguards. The reason is that they’ve received death threats and are harassed as a result of the deceptive ads being run on their network. It’s not really that funny though because it’s true. It’s the part of the seedy side of the social platform business and while not all developers are deciding to participate, it’s big money which brings in over $1 million a day for some of the ad networks.
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Over the past month we’ve been testing out the new Facebook ad manager and according to a post from Facebook yesterday, it will be rolled out to all users “in the coming weeks”. For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to test out the new ad manager, we thought it would be good to share some of the new features.
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The saying goes, “It doesn’t matter how many fans [users, visitors, etc] you have, it’s the quality that counts.” Unfortunately that’s not the way marketers and brands see things. How are they measuring things? By the number of fans of course! Take a recent article by Jared Stevens in which he compares Bacardi to Absolut in regards to their Facebook presence. As of October 14th, Bacardi had “32,187 fans on its official Facebook page; compare that to the more than 432,000 fans Absolut vodka has”, Stevens writes. So does that mean Absolut has been more successful in their marketing?
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Last night I noticed an ad on Facebook for the new Dirty Jobs season and it really struck a chord with me. While I’ve seen event engagement advertisements before, it really began to make sense and also made it more clear why traditional display advertising is dying. The ad (pictured to the side) encourages users to RSVP to the first episode of the season. The result is that users get reminded of the first episode once they RSVP.
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When the Facebook platform launched over two years ago, a new advertising model was built: pay per install. Since then, millions of dollars have been spent on application install campaigns. Many brands are realizing that it’s much more difficult to get users returning on a regular basis to your applications though and as such this model has some serious weaknesses. That’s why many advertisers are turning to the “pay per fan” model.
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A number of the large ad networks have been reaching out to developers to let them know that they essentially have no idea what’s going on. Facebook has taken the latest actions without giving developers any form of early notification and many ad networks feel left in the dark. Those developers that have ad supported business models (the majority of Facebook developers) feel as though their businesses are in jeopardy. The rationale is that if they can’t trust what were previously reliable ad networks, who can they trust?
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A number of applications have been systematically shut down over the past few days due to running aggressive advertisements. Facebook is sending out the following statement to developers, explaining why the apps have been shut down: “Ads are misleading and don’t represent what’s being advertised. Landing pages emulate Facebook features to deceive users and use deceptive billing practice. (Platform Guidelines section #4, 5, 9)”. This is a sign that Facebook is turning up the heat on aggressive ads on all fronts.
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It appears that Social Hour, one of the few ad networks to be completely banned from the Facebook platform, has now relaunched under a new name: Dizzy Networks. According to one source, Social Hour had been looking for a new face for the company and according to the company’s website, they hired Jeremy Olsson, who was previously the Director of Performance Marketing for RockYou. While the company is still focused on trying to convert IQ quizzes, it doesn’t appear as though Dizzy Networks is running as aggressive of advertisements this time around.
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