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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

FB is clearly gasping for every last bit of money lately. Other day I saw nearly every ad on right of my page like it was a porn website. Each ad features scantly naked women with captions like "She wants you now". When you click on those links you land of completely irrelevant websites trying to push some maleware.

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I've run a lot of Facebook ads before and I keep very close attention to the ads that are shown on Facebook. In their defense, they have over a million advertisers, they can't catch everything. Many scammy advertisers will be on one day and banned the next, I would hope. Though, it's definitely possible they are more lenient on certain advertisers now that money is even more important.

The more things you 'like' on Facebook, the better the targeting will be. Considering I work in marketing and visit a lot of sites at the office, I'm constantly getting retargeting ads. Less so the scammy dating ones (though it happens).

Did you find your Facebook ads profitable? We've experimented with them a lot, and have never been able to get a reasonable return on them. However, our goal has been driving actual sales of a product, not just getting Likes (as many ads seem to be doing).

@zippergz: I do ads at a performance based marketing company. For some clients Facebook is great at driving tons of volume with good performance. I've also seen clients who pay a bunch for user-signups and it doesn't back out to sales for their particular product. Buying likes is something people do more for brand awareness (not so different than say McDonalds buying a TV commercial but can't measure the exact ROI).

I think the difference often comes down to how well you set up your campaign. There is often a razor thin line between profitability and losing money in a performance-based campaign you're tying directly to sales.

If you'd like to ping me at jonathan@hypedsound.com or let me know through here what your product is, I might be able to guess at whether it seems feasible.

Well, it is a publicly-traded company now. When a shareholder sees the opportunity to make a dime, he'll seize it.

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