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Comment by dlokshin | Hacker News Reader

In the very beginning (2004 when I was a freshman), I remember being able to buy ads myself, for something like $10 for 1,000 views. This was really, really popular. People would advertise all sorts of things like parties, furniture, etc. A really popular advertisement was for roommates to pitch in and buy 10,000 views of "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EMILY! WE LOVE YOU!" and a picture of the blocking group to the left.

These advertisements were great because they were SUPER TARGETED, directed towards me by someone I probably knew. I remember sitting at my desk, refreshing the page just to see which new ads popped up. It was wonderful!

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What a novel concept: users actually wanting to create and see ads because they are so incredibly targeted and relevant. I wonder at what point facebook lost their grasp around such a tightly coupled ecosystem.

When they got rid of Networks. As they moved outside of schools, the natural grouping of everyone in the system around your college (and later by company) was lost. The Groups feature never really re-captured this kind of dynamic because the new groups are inherently smaller and not forced.

Another big factor was the introduction of the news feed. Now people are doing the same thing as ads (though, on a smaller scale) by posting updates and having them read through the news feeds of their friends. The old 2004 ads were the only way to communicate between users without posting on their wall.

Probably because the amount of money to be made from college seniors advertising parties is a microscopic fraction compared to the amount of money that Nike is willing to pay to reach those same college students.

Interestingly, I did this for an event hosted by a student organization at my small university (~3,000 full-time students) last spring. According to the campaign statistics, CA$10.54 bought an astonishing 101,937 impressions. This is somewhat less impressive when you consider that we were paying by clickthrough to the event page, not by impressions, and only got 43 clicks, but due to the size of the university, I think almost every page view that whole weekend had an instance of our ad.

Edit: I feel I should clarify that last remark for those not immediately familiar with Facebook, or those who use ad-blockers: yes, of course there were a whole lot more than 100k page views that weekend, but our targeting was perhaps a bit too constrained (~1.1k users targeted out of a hypothetical 3-4k applicable), and on top of that, Facebook only reloads ads when you perform “serious” navigation, not just AJAX-based actions available directly from the news feed.

I've bought some FB ads, and it is annoying that I can't target friends. Isn't that a big mistake?!? Most businesses are small, so just targeting your friends is simpler than getting your friends to "Like" your business, and then targeting your likes. I didn't know the feature used to exist, it would be nice to get it back!

This used to annoy me (especially when people created events in place of ads) but it's mostly solved now with the ability to promote your posts. That's going to work way better than an ad that your friends are used to ignoring.

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