Hacker News Reader

Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

The ~$60million is over 15 years, so it's about $330k/month on average, which is still a very substantial amount of money, but at "Facebook scale" this is pocket money you find in the sofa; their revenue is about $5.8 billion a month. For Facebook, the effect is like refusing to serve a customer their coffee at a coffee shop.

I suppose that's the real problem with these kind of issues; you see the same on e.g. YouTube where even fairly large channels acting in good faith can run in to problems. I don't think there's any malice involved, but it's just too much effort to fix, there are other things going on, and they've got enough money anyway: so why bother?

Even just a few years ago, Facebook's revenue was a lot smaller, so that would explain why they were more outgoing at the time.

View on HN

$330k/month means that you could have multiple employees specifically and solely tasked with managing this one account. It is not a small amount by any means.

Not true at all. 330k a month might at best get you one representative who has a book of business around 75-100 accounts.

jgurewitz's post is probably closer to the expectation. $330k/month is a nice chunk of change, but that's their primary revenue that's expected to mostly go to support the rest of their business operations. They're obviously not going to spend all of it on employees to manage that specific account.

You could but isn't the whole thesis of the internet-business a la Google or Facebook that it's "automated"?

Ad buy isn't that automated. Check out vendors like Wordstream -- it stays complicated above the minimal purchase threshholds.

It’s not dollars, it’s CAD, so significantly less.

Well yes and no.

FB revenue in 2019 was 70e9$. I also assume that Freebies spending was not constant over the 16 years. So their spending represented almost 1/10000 of FB revenue.

I agree you can probably afford to lose that as a business owner but you probably can't be "meh, whatever" either. I expect that a decision of that scale would have probably be considered by many people / relatively highly ranked employee.

(At least, at that scale, I wouldn't give the authority to two low level support staff and an algorithm to delete 1/10000 of my global revenues...)

To clarify: I don't think that "meh whatever" is literally what people are saying (to each other or themselves), it's just that there are also other customers, new leads, and all sorts of other things to do, so it's more of a "doesn't matter enough to actually take action"-kind of thing. Or, in short, "meh, whatever" :-)

And there are probably other factors as well, such as poor internal communication, algorithms making poor decisions, and more. But those are all solvable problems and I suspect that "meh whatever"-attitude plays a fairly large role in them not getting fixed at various levels. I mean, if my company left 330k/month on the table then I'd run after that faster than Usain Bolt. But do you think Zuckerberg or other top-level managers at Facebook will?

But I have no insight in any of this, so I'm just guessing really...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com