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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

>"You want proof? Look at their financial statements."

Homeopathy peddlers make a killing, so does the agile consultants and th catholic Church, if this is proof they must both be right?

Just because someone made loads of money doesnt mean their claims are sciebtifivally valid.

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I went out of my way not to give Facebook any moral high ground, and yet you still managed to get offended.

Snark isn't a sign of offense.

Call it what you want, the outcome is the same. You want to say [A], but before you say it, you have to start with [B] just not to get the conversation derailed by call-it-what-you-wants. And it turns out, the call-it-what-you-wants are still going to do their thing, pretending this is Reddit.

I call it a sound challenge to your fallacious argument from profitability. Your non sequitur derailed the conversation.

Would you mind to elaborate? I am genuinely wondering if you're a troll or if I am mistaken in my argument. To summarize, I responded to the claim below that Facebook's ad platform is ineffective:

> All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway.

I pointed out that Facebook wouldn't be profitable if the ad platform is ineffective, and you called that argument fallacious. I am really curious to hear what's fallacious about it.

The fallacy is that Facebook making a profit doesn't mean that invasive ad targeting is effective.

It just means that Facebook is good at selling ads, whether they are effective or not.

I guess we have to define effective. Is it effective from the consumer point of view? That might be a long discussion, and we might assume that a world without advertising might be the most effective way to live your life, etc. But is it effective from the advertisers' point of view? Unless you want to call 5+ million marketing teams around the world total idiots, you have to assume that they are meeting or exceeding their ROAS targets and therefore pouring a lot of money into Facebook.

> It just means that Facebook is good at selling ads, whether they are effective or not.

Facebook doesn't sell ads. Marketers choose to sign up and spend money, because their jobs depend on being able to achieve ROAS targets. Contrary to popular belief, the world of marketing is very quantified and apart from experimental budgets, most of the money is spent on channels that are proven to work.

But without getting any deeper into all of this, I think I found my answer - it appears that at least a subsegment of people on HN believe that over 100BN of ad dollars (25% of overall digital ad market) is spent on Facebook in an unprofitable way, and that 5 million marketing teams get away with it, year after year. Hence, it's possible for Facebook to achieve great financial results without their ad platform being effective.

If that's your takeaway, then I think you need to read this thread again.

1) Nobody is saying that ads aren't profitable or that marketers are throwing money out the window because they are stupid. The discussion is about whether invasive user tracking is effective. Ads can be profitable even though user tracking is ineffective.

2) This thread also is mostly about your very weak argument. You wrote:

> Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof? Look at their financial statements.

That's just not a good argument. Who knows, maybe Facebooks tracking really is the best thing in the world, but the fact that Facebook is raking in loads of cash on its own tells us very little about how effective their user tracking is.

You're just confused about how marketing works. The fact that you're dissociating tracking sophistication from performance tells me all I need to know. To learn more, dig a bit into the iOS14 impact on the Facebook performance results.

I just tried to explain why people think your argument is fallacious.

You said:

> I am really curious to hear what's fallacious about it.

But apparently that was just a figure of speech, not an actual question.

Your 'proof' doesn't make sence, what does 'offense' or 'moral high ground' have to do with it?

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