Hacker News Reader

Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

He paid $10 for area that included India and Egypt, for only one day, receiving 1600 likes in one day. He paid additional $50 for smaller area that didn't have these countries for 3 days, receiving 1400 likes, average 350 per day.

So: 1600 likes from India and Egypt in one day: $10 == 0.6 cent per like. 350 likes without that area: $16 per day == 4.6 cent per like.

Where's the surprise? If he pays for cheaper likes, he gets the cheaper likes.

Did he expect to pay for cheap likes and get the expensive ones? Does such an expectation have any economic sense?

View on HN

I still don't see how the size of the area matters. He's not showing it to everyone in the area, just ten bucks worth of them,

But his complaint isn't about the price per like. It's about the fact that likes per impression are ten times higher in certain countries. Can you explain that disparity?

The disparity you observe is already reflected in the prices he paid, as he presented it and as I calculate in the post you just replied. He paid different order of magnitude for different kinds of likes. That's how the market functions when it functions.

We can theorize all day "why" but we don't have any information about that. What he presents is only how much he paid and how much he received, and there everything seems consistent.

I really can't understand you here. Apparently you find it so amazingly obvious that India will click a like button ten times as much as the UK that you said "he acts surprised!?". Why is it so obvious to you that these likes are 'cheaper'? You certainly haven't given any reasons.

People are looking at the market doing something strange and your contribution is "the market functions, who cares".

Sure, I'm not very surprised that if the likes seem highly fraudulent the price per like is lower, but that's not the issue. The issue is these fraud-seeming levels in the first place!

>Why is it so obvious to you that these likes are 'cheaper'?

I was thinking the same thing. Maybe it's not so much that people in India click a like button ten times as much, but that more people in India get to see the ads. I assume Facebook somehow reserves ad space for you, but since many more people advertise in the UK, they can only show the ad to the target audience every 1 out of 100 page views, while it might be 10 out of 100 in India. If you advertise in India and the UK at the same time, Facebook will probably reserve a lot more slots in India, because that's cheaper for them. If they want to maximize their revenue, it would be smart to sell the sought-after UK slots to companies that can pay a lot. Indian likes are cheaper because more people want to advertise in the UK but there are fewer slots, so UK likes become more expensive.

The fact his experiment obtained is simply that there are cheaper and more expensive likes. You don't dispute that I hope? So it's obvious to me because of experiment of his. It would be strange if the prices didn't match the fact, which would mean that he was tricked. But they actually did. I support you if you are curious what produces the effects, I just claim that the article doesn't give any information about that and that from information he gives, everything fits -- the prices matched what he obtained.

It showed two things.

1. likes vary in price per area

2. click rate varies per area

Of course he's not claiming anything doesn't 'fit' in his data. That would require screwing up basic arithmetic about clicks. The author didn't claim to be tricked by facebook. He was surprised by the order of magnitude differences. Why don't you see that surprise as valid? And of course the article doesn't give the data to explain why, because the author doesn't know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com