Comment by corin_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by corin_ | Hacker News Reader

$3 CPM is far more expensive that generic Facebook adverts (known for being very cheap in terms of CPM), and it's a fairly typical price for digital advertising. Obviously it depends on the industry, the audience, etc. etc. but $3 is fairly common.

The reason it feels like such a terrible deal here is that you aren't paying $3 CPM to reach a new audience, you are paying $3 CPM to reach your audience. Sure, Facebook can argue "it's the most targeted audience possible, they're Mavericks fans!" but the counter to that is "of course they are, it's my brand that put this audience together".

Brands use Facebook because it's far more user-friendly than trying to collect your fans together on your own website, and therefore it's a better solution - easier for your fans means more will do it, so you have more people to market to. However the comparison is that they're people who have chosen to subscribe to you, and therefore the pricing comparison is not to digital advertising, but to writing to fans on a website, or a blog, or through email newsletters. This is why it feels like, and arguably is, a rip off.

As to the argument that it's needed from a user's point of view and that Facebook happens to be able to monetise to help their users (e.g. jeffwidman's comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4785852) I'm not really sure. It's probably a valid point. I'm not a Facebook user myself (but my marketing work occasionally covers Facebook), my personal feeling is that if I follow a brand it's because I want to see their updates. All of their updates. In my head, it's the same as signing up to a newsletter, or subscribing to an RSS feed, just through a convenient third party. But as I don't do it myself, I'm happy to consider myself wrong, or in the minority, maybe if I was an active user following many brands that I care about I would find that getting 100% of their messages would ruin my Facebook experience.

All great points.

One note: the $3 I noted in the article actually isn't CPM, it's Cost-Per-Reach, or Cost Per Unique Impression. This is an important distinction because most digital/display advertising functions on a CPM basis, where one person might see an ad multiple times. On Facebook, when a Page promotes a post, that post is only displayed to that user once.

Brands have a tendency to abuse the trust of someone opting-in, whether that's on Twitter, Facebook, Email, etc. When this happens, most people aren't aware enough to understand the cause and effect - instead of blaming the brand for being spammy, they get frustrated with Facebook.

The News Feed Algorithm and Sponsored Stories are Facebook's way of ensuring a better user experience. By pushing brands to pay a small price for distribution, Facebook gets brands to think about what they're publishing and to take advantage of the targeting options that Facebook makes available, so that their content reaches the right people.

Is it certain they will see the post? What if they don't login for a few days?

A sponsored post can stick around for a while. But in any case, if a user doesn't come they don't charge. It's exceedingly unlikely that 100% of your followers will see a post, but you don't pay for that.

Then it doesn't reach the user and nobody is being charged as if it did.

Make brands pay so that they think about what theyre publishing? Ridiculous. Ive got 3 million fans on facebook and my reach has gone from 8 million per week to 2 million. Posting the same type of content ive always posted. Its not a question of posting better things in order to maintain the reach i had before. Ive been doing this for three years and the switch that fb turned off two months ago is just a nasty way of saying thank you to the content generators that gave them billions of pageviews during the past years.

Spot on!

One thing to note, when you said "my personal feeling is that if I follow a brand it's because I want to see their updates", the tricky think about facebook is that you don't "follow" a brand like you do on Twitter, you just "like" them. In my opinion, it's a small but important distinction. Just because you enjoy a certain brand doesn't mean you actually want to know every little thing they're doing.

Yeah, great point here. Facebook really emphasized this difference awhile back when they started allowing users to "Like" a Page, but then choose to hide it from their News Feed.

This allows me, as a Facebook user, to complete my profile and declare that I like something, even if the marketing that the associated Page is doing isn't something I want to see.

This ensures that profile information remains accurate, which is critical for ad targeting - people don't start unliking things they actually like, just to avoid annoying marketing. The interest graph remains intact even when brands make poor marketing decisions.

Do people associate liking things with "completing their profiles"?

Maybe I've been on the other side for too long, but I equate liking a page with opting into their facebook marketing content, and I unlike if I want to opt out.

Yes, that's how FB poses it, as part of your profile. For instance, "What music do you like?" You type in some groups, and that counts as liking them. Suddenly, you get to see news about each concert, blu-ray, etc. they're doing, right in your feed. Not a great experience.

I'm not sure why anyone would assume a very casual social "hey I like X" is equivalent to "subscribe".

People make that assumption because facebook is filled with social people rather than anti-social people who worry that someone they 'like' might actually talk to them.

In normal social circles there an expectation that the you want to hear about things you 'like'. For instance if in real life I have a friend who 'likes' classical music then when I hear something about classical music I will talk to them about it.

Also like is not like subscribe because the idea behind subscribing is that you receive everything. For instance if I 'subscribed' to a magazine I would be rather upset if they only sent me every 7th issue, or only sent me issues when the newspaper had not arrived.

"Do people associate liking things with "completing their profiles"?"

People commonly associate/link their personal identity with media and products, certainly.

Surely keeping the records up to date for marketing is pointless if a user has decided to not receive marketing information?

> Just because you enjoy a certain brand doesn't mean you actually want to know every little thing they're doing.

Twitter is more obvious semantically, but heavy Likers of brands on Facebook already understand the implication, and increasingly so will everyone else, regardless of the terminology. For me it's basically to the point where I only Like things that are owned or run by people that I actually know.

I am reminded

I never liked anything on facebook (via a 'like' button) but I do have several likes.

Before the facebook feed , before even the facebook wall, the personal information field of your profile was a text blob. Over time facebook parsed this information and matched it to pages, giving me likes.

Now i get updates from films in my feed because 7 years ago I added them to a text field called 'movies/tv'

Doesn't bother me because I hardly use facebook anymore. But it is interesting to think how it has changed.

Exactly. At first I was all "I'll like every FB page of things I like in RL". But then I was getting annoyed at some of the crap that these pages were putting into my feed so I "unliked" pretty much everything. I wish there was a way to "like" something so that it is reflected in your interests and what not, but NOT get their updates. Maybe there is and I haven't seen it.

Yes there is, just hover over the "Liked" button and uncheck "Show in news feed" on the Facebook page itself.

When you click to remove a post from your newsfeed, facebook prompts you with "unsubscribe from this page's updates" — there's also a tab in the top right of these stories (and of people's updates) that allows you to set the frequency you receive news from them.

No, you're paying $3 CPM to reach Facebook's audience. They own the platform. You're just visiting. And nobody rides free. The price for the users is to be spammed and data mined. The price for advertisers is to pay cash.

It was the brands who sent the fans there via multiple marketing channels (TV, their website, etc), who updated the content for fans to have, etc..

So what? Those other marketing channels, like TV, newspaper advertisements, and so on, aren't free. And neither is Facebook.

I'm sure that Mark Cuban's hockey team drives a lot of viewers to watch TV. Does that mean Mark should get to advertise for free on television? That's not how the networks see it. [edit: this is a really bad example]

It's funny that we've gone from being outraged about spam and all-pervasive advertising, to being outraged that spammers have to actually pay to send the stuff.

I think he would have less complaints if Facebook paid his team the amount of money TV networks pay for sports rights.

That's a pretty insightful comment. I think it really gets to the heart of the issue-- Mark brings a lot of value to the TV networks, but not that much to Facebook. And Facebook knows it.

How doesn't keeping fans on the Facebook website not compare equally to keeping fans watching a specific TV station? The value is there.

Brands need a Facebook presence more than Facebook needs a brand to drive and keep a user on Facebook is why brands will never get kickbacks for maintaining their Facebook page.

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