1. The OP did not make $10,000 in one day. 2. We don't know how well this would have done on a non-Facebook platform.
My point is that this is like arguing that Facebook is a wonderful platform because Apple makes a lot of money and Apple uses Facebook to advertise. Apple would be making a lot of money without Facebook ads, too; if a company using Facebook ads generates $X revenue, that doesn't mean those Facebook ads were responsible for a specific amount of the revenue.
In short: congrats to the author! But this doesn't really prove anything.
Now you're almost willfully missing the point.
Surely something with stats as lucrative as this yard sale would mean that he would create a startup based around selling other peoples stuff after advertising through FB events instead??
Right now though, I'm having a blast working on Facebook Analytics with my team at PageLever.
So many in fact there are even university courses for it.
I still have some records left over, thinking about doing another sale, would be game to test another means of customer acquisition and report back with results.
I really wish you could apply multi-armed bandit approaches to physical problems like these more easily; obviously its hard to do A/B testing when you only have one actual supply.
There are certainly a lot of forums out there too, but most of them aren't local to one area, so most of the sales are online (I did a lot of business through these forums in the past).
In retrospect, it would have been rad to run this as a fully fledged A/B test. I honestly just didn't know that the ads would have quite the impact that they did.
It's a real life product, at a very low price with a very specific niche.
If this was a rule and not an exception, every big company in the world would be using these ads. Another point is that it was an event ad, so it was there for a very small window of time, limiting the exposure to any kind of botting.
Funny how he tries to say people should use utm campaigns and not care about bots clicking your ads.
Facebook captures location + interests.
Also, most big companies in the world actually are trying to figure out how to use Facebook Ads right now. The problem is that most haven't figured out how to create a compelling enough value proposition - I click on the ad, but what compels me as a user to take the next step? It's a big challenge for companies and agencies who are accustomed to being able to pay for captive audiences.
To me, it shows the power of combining native Facebook functionality like Events with Facebook Ads.