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Comment by firephreek | Hacker News Reader

"Personalized Ads for Small Businesses" What a bunch of malarkey. I've worked in ad space and the actual ability for SB's to compete is laughable. Their budgets are so comparatively small that they simply don't get the assistance necessary. They're drinking through paper straws while the big dogs swim in lakes.

SB's absolutely need a platform to compete, but I'm absolutely incredulous that FB is that platform, much less Google or any other like company.

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My GF built a small business with $12K MRR on top of Facebook and uses Facebook/Instagram ads. Apparently there are swarms of businesses like hers; buying and selling crystals.

I am against Facebook, but they are not lying at all. Facebook’s walled garden offers a robust advertising platform for small businesses that actually evens the field.

I do programmatic advertising on top of the open web, and your experience is correct there, but FB is different.

I know of a small business in upstate NY that gets 80% of their sales from FB ads. Without FB, this business which also has a retail store, would certainly be having a lot more of a rough time. And they are not an isolated story. I know of at least 5 other small businesses that similarly generate from 25% to 70% of sales via FB. It's given these small businesses a way to compete against bigger competitors.

The impact of these changes on FB ads depends on what kind of ads you run - VBO, AAA, and LAL will be challenged. But interest, geo, and demo targeting will continue as is. None of these iOS changes affect FB’s ability to serve ads, nor small business’ ability to run ads and find customers. It’s the tracking of activity and the deeper funnel events that is changing, not advertising for small business

For a small business that’s been very successful through word-of-mouth and is now gearing up to begin marketing that includes online advertising:

What tools or platforms for advertising are a better fit for small business in your mind?

FB and Adwords is fine, just apply a large dose of skepticism to any data they provide that you’re not able to verify yourself. For example Facebook will vastly over attribute conversions to itself, even if other channels have done the heavy lifting.

They should own their social media again instead of leasing out their IP to FB for little to no exposure.

Small business is just a propaganda tool. The idea has some allure, maybe because it reminds Americans of their priomordial beginning as settlers, homesteaders, yeomans, craftsmen (or so the stories go).

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...

In real numbers most businesses in the US are "small businesses" because they have 500 or fewer employees. It says nothing about their financials though. A hedge fund managing billions of dollars, a start up with millions in VC funding, and a mom and pop florist are all "small businesses".

I'm definitely not disagreeing "small business" has been turned into a propaganda term. That process was helped by the silly tax classification of what's a "small business". A lot of marketing dollars go into making people think the mom and pop florist when they hear the term and not the hedge fund.

There's also the allure of the local restaurant/store/etc versus the national chain, that everyone can see all around them even in the present day.

Small business vs Big tech. A clever diversion.

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