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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

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!

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>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.

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