Comment by sicktriple
9 days ago
You don't actually need to click on an ad or purchase something from an ad site in order for Facebook to make money selling ad space.
The moment these ads are loaded on the page, real time auction occurs, where advertisers place bids algorithmically and automatically, based on your profile. Facebook makes it's money by selling this ad space. It doesn't particularly care whether you click on them or not. But if they don't load in the first place, there's nothing for Facebook to sell.
The real insideous part is that advertisers don't need to actually bid on the auction to participate, and anyone participating gets to havest your ad profile. This is one of the big ways data brokers are able to build profiles on you. They can then do whatever they want with this info, and you'd probably never know.
That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them. If ads are loaded or not is also often verified by independent third party trackers that you have to embed on your page next to the ad. There's whole industries built on this stuff and it's not as simple as "we sell the slot and don't care if people see it or click on it".
Ad placements can still appear to perform if the targeted user was already planning to buy the product and Google/Meta attribute the sale to the ad impression they shove in at the last minute. FortNine (a Canadian motorcycle gear retailer) published an expose and seem quite convinced that this is an extremely common occurrence. It would also justify why Meta would be so aggressive about showing ads even to an unreceptive audience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfNIRyPi5QA
I mean you are both right, it's been a few years since I have been in adtech, and it isn't black and white. There are few places that will pay for stuff that isn't clicked through, but there are places that are willing to pay on an impression basis for things like video or images. It's just like not worth it to most places to throw those ads on their property since it's fairly low quality advertisers.
More to the point though, if there isn't ads rendered, you can't even get accidental clicks.
The teams spending the kind of money these ad networks care about are doing a lot of upper funnel brand marketing where exposure is more important than clicks and where conversions are expected to be much lower for this segment of spend.
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> That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them.
You'd be surprised at how opaque and complex ad attribution and ROAS calculation has become for the average business, and how many marketing departments are operating on high-level metrics without having an intuitive understanding of how their ads are performing. Many of them rely on the ad networks' own metrics to determine ad performance, and don't even have their own internal attribution models.
They will not book them once they learn they have been defrauded for a while.
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> It probably would have been more helpful if you took the time to quote the particular part of my comment which you believe to be untrue.
He did.
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> If youre referring to whether or not Meta "cares" of you click and ad or not, then fair play. I'd argue that's more or less semantics, but ok, they do care and there is indeed an entire industry built on them caring.
This also depends on whether ads are being sold as "pay-per-click" or "pay-per-view" (although in the biz they say "impression" rather than "view"). For the latter, websites like Meta who sell ad space only get paid when people actually click on them.
An AI wrote this comment.
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>whether you click or not doesn't change the fact that there is still ad sales happening in the background
if nobody clicks on the ads nobody's going to buy ad space because people who place ads care about whether their ads translate into sales. So of course Facebook cares, and ultimately only cares about how many people respond to them because how much money they'll make depend on how much money the ads make.
That's why FB has invested ungodly sums into trying to figure out the preferences of their users.
I would say, then, that Facebook is perpetrating fraud. They are knowingly defeating ad blockers to sell ad space that they know will not lead to any click-throughs and conversions.
They don't know that, and it probably isn't true.
This is correct, and the extra insidious part is that folks who are tech-savvy and privacy-conscious are more valuable profiles than normies, because we generally work in higher income jobs/industries. So whether we click or not is irrelevant, Facebook gets paid more for showing us ads than they do for typical normies.
and thats why you lock down your privacy, so they get nothing other than "generic privacy enthusiast #1000101010101"
Good luck. I'd wager that most methods to protect your privacy aren't nearly as effective as we think they are. While I don't think it means that you shouldn't try to protect your information, I typically assume that anything short of very extreme measures is only mildly effective.
One of the biggest problems in software development is that our graph of authoritative personal data is cyclical. You might have heard about how difficult it was for someone erroneously declared dead to change the record, and I'm sure most of us have experienced problems with changing an address. A friend recently went through two name changes and one phone number change, and it took like eight months for the bottom-feeders to realign.
We are now in an adversarial situation regarding our personal information, but our adversaries depend on sources we have a modicum of control over. If I signed my dog up for a physical mailer, I wonder how long would it take for a portion of the internet to consider Doctor-Professor Kensington a legal individual.
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im constanty being asked to fill out captchas (which i close) and am accused of being a bot by many of the sites i visit, so i guess im doing something right?