Here Comes Facebook’s Ad Network: Mobile Ads Launching This Month | Hacker News Reader

Here Comes Facebook’s Ad Network: Mobile Ads Launching This Month

recode.net

40 pointsuptown26 comments

If there was any doubt as to why mobile browsers are so uncustomizable, it is specifically because it is the last remaining place where users are held captive by content providers.

This is why Google and Apple don't allow plugins. This is why mobile is important. It's the last place users can be held down and forced to view advertisements against their wishes. Why do you think Firefox Home (mobile) was killed off? There's no money in it.

> This is why Google and Apple don't allow plugins. This is why mobile is important. It's the last place users can be held down and forced to view advertisements against their wishes.

It's clear why Google is incentivized to force users to view advertisements, but why Apple? AFAICT they don't profit from banner ads on others' sites (IIRC there are no iAds for Safari)

Chrome fan here who finally switched to firefox mobile because of this specific issue.

Ad block plus + ghostery.

it would damage their position of everyone developing first for IOS. which is sadly the current state. as soon as those users stop briging money to the publishers, apple will have a phone incompatible with most sites...

My guess is that the recent 'nearby friends' feature from FB was no coincedence. Once I'm already being alerted that my friends are at the bar I just drove by, why not an alert that the ice cream shop I just passed is having a 25% off sale? Facebook and Google are probably the only companies with enough small business advertisers to pull this off, and I don't think Google has enough active mobile activity to pu this off (especially without WhatsApp). And of course it would be far too risky to build that into Android and push everyone to iOS. I think it's pretty clear Adwords is useless for your local ice cream shop, but an always active mobile alert for nearby customers could provide huge results. I've been expecting this for years but without a massive userbase and a significant number of advertisers it just wouldn't work. I think we're reaching the point where it is viable now though.

I already have Google maps on my phone. If I want to find an ice cream shop nearby, I will look up ice cream on Google maps. If there are two equally close I may be inclined to go to the one that has an add saying 25% off, but that is basically Groupon with a search nearby feature.

One feature that could be useful is "Siri/Google what restaurants have less than a 15 minute wait near me?" or "Google what bars nearby have Sam Adams on tap?" I'm not sure how much a bar would pay facebook/google for this feature though?

Nearby friends is opt-in, i don't think it will have much succes in the normal world.

+ every app that notities me about a discount in an ice Cream shop is getting deleted.

So finally Facebook enters the dominant market of Google. I bet the social giant can do ads better, but vice verse?

I thought they already tried that - and failed. People predicted for years that Facebook will build an ad network that will threaten Google's ad business, because it's "social". However, Facebook's ad network turned out to be a little more than a glorified traditional ad network: just showing ads to eyeballs, and only segmenting by a certain demographic and on some "interests". But that's still nowhere near the efficiency of intent-based ad networks, where people actually look for the stuff they might be interested in buying, as opposed to ads being pushed to them still mostly randomly.

There's actually not that much money in building an AdSense competitor, as AdSense-related revenues are plunging http://www.zdnet.com/googles-earnings-what-future-for-plungi... with webmasters building made-for-adsense sites tailored for click-throughs, advertisers opting out of perceived lower-quality traffic, and quality publishers having access to higher premiums with other networks (including Google's own).

AdBrite comes to mind as the most well-known third party competitor, and they shut down last year.

A $12B plunging market still has some value to it.

You are forgetting context. Its hard to sell something to someone who is chatting.

On Google, people search stuff... Thats the place for ads. When you buy things, you search for products and reviews. You dont need social context for that .

yay! new ways to shred your ad budget on facebook's fraudulent clicks and spam click farms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g

In my opinion, on the mobile phone, I almost always accidentally click the ad while trying to close it, never because I was interested in the ad itself like I would be when I search for something on google and see an text ad beside the search results.

Many app developers place ads where you hit them accidentally, especially kids games. I rarely hear of any crackdown on this practice lately. When I open my online marketing to mobile devices on Adwords initially the top volumes tend to be kids apps from these types of apps. I then have to go through them manually removing as I'll find some with 1,000+ clicks and not one sale (I usually convert around 25% on the main site I advertise for). Google have to know what they are doing and it feels borderline fraudulent, not like years back when they jumped on any click fraud.... but got-to keep them revenue numbers up.

This is one of the reasons I use the built-in always-on VPN to stay connected to my firewall at home which then blocks all advertisements.

Another reason I do this is that ads are an attack vector, which I prefer to minimize.

Very true, it is a problem, but I still experience better ROI for most ad campaigns via mobile advertising (even if you throw in the misclicks it still comes in cheaper at scale).

Even with Facebook ads? I've had 10x to the CTR on mobile vs desktop news feed ads with 10x less conversion rate

Yes I've experienced great ROI on mobile newsfeed, but also desktop newsfeed too. I think both of those are better in term s of ROI than their current right-hand rail ads (the ones on the side of the page they used to exclusively have).

I found if your CTR is TOO high to the point you get tons of misclicks and bad conversion, make your image size much smaller (max 150 pixels).

Has anyone done any study on what % of ads are accidentally clicked? You know an ad here and five there could add to $billions. Ads that look like content and ads that are easy to click by accident are designed that way.

Spider.io used to release quite a few studies on this. One such: http://www.spider.io/blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/

But they got bought over by Google recently - Didn't think Google would need to acquire a team around fraud detection and prevention - GOOG pretty much wrote the book on Click Fraud.

Personally felt it was a deal done more to prevent the release of such articles that might harm the Online Ad World or GOOG's creds.

People are still using Facebook?

Yeah, billions of them apparently.

Deleted comment

Ah the great "massive exodus from their service" update. Funny how this happens every update.

Usage of Facebook has been declining for years because of how slow they were to adapt to mobile. Sure, people still use Facebook, but they're also using other stuff, and Facebook's percentage is (and has been for years) dropping.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com