Hacker News Reader

Comment by interpol_p | Hacker News Reader

I know of a developer that did this. They purchased the cheapest possible Facebook ads and targeted them towards the largest audience. They received hundreds of thousands of "likes" for a relatively small investment ($1000 or so). Most of the people who liked their page had profiles from developing countries.

They then used the number of likes they had amassed (~200k) to get funding for their new product. It worked. Everyone took them much more seriously when they mentioned how many fans they had on Facebook. They were even able to attract licensing deals from some fairly big brands because their Facebook page looked so impressive.

View on HN

This is a scam. He's using scammers to scam other people. Maybe that's obvious to everyone here, but I think it's worth stating explicitly that while this behavior is being enabled by the state of advertising on Facebook, it's still unethical and dishonest.

An interesting aspect is that someone could be essentially perpetrating this scam while legitimately being innocent of malevolent intent. I don't know if that's the case in the story recounted above (I suspect not), but I have met a small business that ran a "successful" Facebook ad campaign to get more likes, and who are happy with the result, where I strongly suspect the quality of the likes is really low. They genuinely think they ran a successful ad campaign with good ROI, and I don't think the intent was to puff up their profile. Afaict they haven't used the number for anything either, but it could well lead to unintentionally misrepresenting their popularity to future potential investors/clients/etc.

Of course, this starts to some extent from Facebook: the small businesses reporting their "successful ad campaign" are more or less passing on the low-quality metrics that Facebook gives to them. Some businesses are aware that these metrics are crap, but then Facebook itself is also aware...

Is it still a scam if the idea is plausible/useful and the product created is actually profitable for the investors?

This actually leaves you worse off than doing nothing at all. The reason being, once you push out actual content, the engagement with your content will be so abysmally low that facebook won't show your content prominently to many of your actual fans.

It's worse than useless, it damages your ability to use facebook as a means to connect with your customers in the future.

It may work ... and if you just want 200k fans no matter what you don't even need Facebook Ads, you can go directly to the like farms and get them for much cheaper.

But then how will he explain his investors that his 200k "Fans" are generating 0 revenues ? :)

I worked for a company that got about 1 million users of their facebook game, mostly purchased. They got this and the CEO mentioned it prominently. Unsurprisingly, paid users generate about zero revenue. Still, it probably sounded good to investors.

This company is bankrupt now.

A lot of business activity is fads. Social media will probably always be a big business, but it seems likely to me that companies have been rushing into it part not knowing what it is worth, part knowing it may not be worth it but it sounds good.

> to get funding for their new product

This is why the SEC has rules barring non-sophisticated investors from investing in equities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com