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Comment by Aloisius | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading that Facebook counts anyone who clicks a like button on any website as being an active user which is certainly b.s. If you can't serve someone an ad (and that's your primary revenue stream), they aren't an active user.

Plus, they almost certainly count public page views to Facebook (like the link above), which means every new non-logged in session gets counted as a new user. It is totally valid in my opinion to count these, but they are hyper-inflationary.

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How is clicking a facebook like button not actively using facebook? I would think that's kind of the definition of being active (as opposed to passive).

And they don't count non-logged-in users. You have to be logged in and either visit facebook.com, or click a like button.

It is deceiving when using it as a metric to sell more ads. Yes, people may be liking stuff, but you can like thousands of things a day and not even open the facebook page, thus not seeing any ads. If they were able to break down like clicks based on whether somebody is on the site or not, that would be a more honest approach (not sure if they do this or not already) as you can see if marketing dollars spent there would be worth it. If many people are liking stuff that is related to your product/market but never go to Facebook.com to see ads, then why waste the money?

If I'm not mistaken, you buy ads on a cost-per-click or a cost-per-thousand-views basis. In other words, you only pay when people see or click your ad. You also choose exactly what audience you'd like to target on FB -- very few companies are rich enough and broad enough that they want to target the entire FB userbase.

Long-story short, Facebook's total monthly active user count is largely irrelevant to individuals purchasing ads.

You don't need to have more views or clicks. If you claim you have 2 or 3x the number of monthlies, you charge more per click or view. You'll attract more advertisers to your site which further drives up the cost of each advertisement.

In this way, inflating monthlies has a direct effect on ad revenue.

This doesn't even make sense. If you are charging per click (or view), you don't charge more because of number of visitors, you make more because Revenue=CPCCTRViews (and Views is getting larger).

Yes they do. The post you are replying to even explained that. If you tell the world "we have a billion users", more companies will decide to purchase advertising on your site than if you tell the truth and say "we have 400 million users". More advertisers competing for the same number of page views means they drive the price per view up, just as any other increase in demand without an increase in supply will drive up prices.

For the same reason as clicking a +1 somewhere doesn't make you an active G+ user.

To my mind it does. I'm contributing something to G+

But I think that to Google - the fact I log into GMAIL makes me an active G+ user.

But a user is consciously clicking the like button on a website and I believe this is a good indication that they are active. At some point the user is bound to visit facebook because and that's when you can serve the ad.

Then only count them when they visit Facebook. There is absolutely no reason to count them when they are on any other website unless you want to artificially inflate your monthly actives.

One user doing nothing but liking random pages still benefits Facebook. If you have friends that never go to facebook.com, but still click the Like button on pages they visit, that still gives Facebook a better opportunity to tailor social advertisements to you, based on what your friends like.

I think counting users that click a like button off-Facebook is probably still valid - it's likely that Facebook will be serving ads off-Facebook at some point.

Maybe they should be counted for 3/5ths of a monthly active user.

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