Facebook is destroying my business. What can I do?

We had this happen a few times with Google. Reading this brings back the feelings I felt at that time; the feeling of being powerless to something 'unfair'. I guess everyone had that one time or another. The reasons why things like this happen are debatable; maybe Google/FB has their reasons to effectively ban companies giving them hundreds of thousands to millions of $ / year (as these guys were and as we were). They are a commercial company and they can decide that and they do decide that. What the infuriating thing is, is the canned response communication. I cannot see that happen in many other business contexts in the world; if you are a $100k or more per year client, it seems totally insane that you get treated like that (actually; I'm not sure it's legal in some countries). The fact you cannot even call someone to just tell you what's up if completely weird. And the reason we will never depend on any 1 company for anything anymore.

This is smart advice always ofcourse, but, for instance, with adwords or adsense, for a long time you really didn't have a choice ; the rest is/was just garbage compared. Adwords has gone downhill a lot and this is good news for Facebook, Bing and others. Adsense still pays most for a lot of niches so a business just depending on ad sales will usually find it hard to diversify.

Now we used adwords for dating as well when Google just removed our ads for various reasons they never told us about (they didn't ban the account, they just told the ads would no longer run) and we did something which i'm not sure will still work but maybe it's worth investigating; we went 'local'; we found sites to advertise on and offline means in all parts of the country and got ads there (cheap) which turned out very effective. Especially on smaller local buy & sell sites / papers etc this returned far more than Google. A lot has changed so i'm not sure if it helps you any, but that's what we did and our profits jumped up with the added bonus that suddenly we had no dependency on Google anymore.

Are you managing your FB ads in house or via agency?

It sounds like in house, which I always highly recommend is best.

However, you might consider reaching out to one of the big FB ad partners like Nanigans. $100k+ account with known ROI, which means you'll ramp quick and advertise long term, will definitely get people drooling at those firms.

Because here's the issue:

While your situation is unfair, and your even allocation idea is great for the most part, it doesn't take into account the size of your competitor's ad budgets.

I'd be willing to bet Zoosk is somewhere in the range of $2M-$10M per year, or more, just on facebook alone. Probably similar amount on Google too.

At that level of spend, the executive level access and ad partner relationships on any advertising platform is a completely different world than yours.

I bet the head of marketing at Zoosk has Sheryl Sandberg's number in their phone and could get her on the line pretty much 24/7 if they REALLY needed too.

You're advocating with a dog whistle, while they have bull horns.

But the big ad platform partners have bull horns too.

And while obviously no one there is calling Sheryl on your behalf, even their regular day to day contacts at facebook are going to be way more influential than yours.

So it may be possible to piggyback off of them to get higher up the ladder.

If they can do that, just run through them until your big enough to have your own bull horn.

If they can't do anything for you because you're too small, you could try reaching out to other niche or regional dating advertisers that got the axe too(pry a ton that are pure desktop still too so even better).

Find ones with only a comfortable level of overlap to you guys and join up to bring all your individual accounts to the first platform that gets you unblocked.

Anyways, sucks and I feel ya, but hopefully some of that is useful.

PS - The 10% even allocation model you outlined is obviously ideal because it lets the market sort it out. But you also have to think about what that market mechanism would do to your business – a slower death. Big players can spend more and afford higher CPIs. They could just take all the oxygen out of the market for others until you die off.

Man, this really demonstrates the level to which the "major advertisers" (Google, Facebook, and friends) actually control the internet--the ecosystem is incredible! It also indicates how much it sucks to base your business on someone else's business. I had a friends company end up in a similar spot after Google started crackin' down on farming AdSense links.

The best possible thing you could do would be to find an alternate advertising model. That is, however, likely impossible for you at this point.

All I can say is good luck--interested in seeing what others have to say!

This is the first time I have read of an advertiser who saying their business is dependent on fb. Usually it is Google cut us off or lowered us in the results thereby killing our business. Maybe fb should highlight this story next time one of the many fb ROI sucks/fake followers stories comes up.

There was a post some time ago about a fast food delivery company using porn sites to generate leads. it's certainly not glamorous but you might wanna try that. i'm seeing pretty low CPMs.

If you've got that much money lying ready, why aren't you already hiring a lawyer to address this with whatever passes for a competition authority in the US?

This is probably OT, but I certainly don't like that people have to post things like this anonymously

When you swim in the muck, don't be surprised when you're treated like scum.