If you actually read the article, the Heineken advertiser's response is:
> “It was like we’d been throwing our money to the mob,” Amram says. “As an advertiser we were paying for eyeballs and thought that we were buying views. But in the digital world, you’re just paying for the ad to be served, and there’s no guarantee who will see it, or whether a human will see it at all.”
This is true. I'm more thinking along the lines of "we have 1 billion active users!"
>you can still do demographic targeting, no?
This I'm not so sure about. Some targeting, sure. But the fake profiles make it more difficult, since the demographic data is also fake.
> Indeed. I was working for a Facebook gaming company around 2010. Through the "recruit a friend" bonuses and "have X friends click this" mechanics, there were incentives to simply make fake accounts to obtain the goals. We looked at our users and figured about half were fake Facebook accounts. I have to imagine the numbers for other companies, like Zynga, were similar, as they used the same mechanics.
You're NOT talking about the same thing.