Facebook has 50% fake traffic?

[Alexander Lau]

Huh? The guy who lead the research created one of the early prototypes with Zuckerberg, while at Harvard.
It's like agencies using Nielsen, because it's the only thing they had at the time.

PlainSite Facebook Reality Check (PDF)

What seems too good to be true often is. The zeitgeist has changed markedly since 2007, when the company was the obsession of virtually every Silicon Valley investor, having built its Platform to make the world “more open and connected.” Yet as bad as things have been of late for Facebook, with endless privacy breaches and Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election hanging over Menlo Park like a spectre, we believe that the situation is far worse than investors realize. Facebook has been lying to the public about the scale of its problem with fake accounts, which likely exceed 50% of its network. Its official metrics—many of which it has stopped reporting quarterly—are self-contradictory and even farcical. The company has lost control of its own product.

 

[JamieS]

Just started reading it. HOLY MOLY, thanks Alex!

[edit]
Finished it. Well, whew. Nothing like reading early-day Zuck AIMs! I have to admit, there is some similarity in the bull-headedness in how I approach some things nowadays in day-to-day work life. But it's hard to tell if he was just otherworldly brazen for the sake of being brazen (ZFG!), or if he actually had some genuine naivety. He was definitely not wrong in some aspects, like consumer trust in peer reviews:

"Zuckerberg's hunch was that users would be more likely to respond favourably to products and services recommended by their friends online relative to traditional advertisements."

Not surprisingly FB came out and rejected the whole thing

 

[Jeff Kershner]

I need to finish reading this... but really, I wish facebook would just implode. Tomorrow. But only for something else to come and takes its place.

 

[Alex Snyder]

I need to finish reading this... but really, I wish facebook would just implode. Tomorrow. But only for something else to come and takes its place.

Like Instagram

 

[JamieS]

TikTok! Ahaha

 

[Alexander Lau]

Just started reading it. HOLY MOLY, thanks Alex!

[edit]
Finished it. Well, whew. Nothing like reading early-day Zuck AIMs! I have to admit, there is some similarity in the bull-headedness in how I approach some things nowadays in day-to-day work life. But it's hard to tell if he was just otherworldly brazen for the sake of being brazen (ZFG!), or if he actually had some genuine naivety. He was definitely not wrong in some aspects, like consumer trust in peer reviews:

"Zuckerberg's hunch was that users would be more likely to respond favourably to products and services recommended by their friends online relative to traditional advertisements."

Not surprisingly FB came out and rejected the whole thing

I mean, of course they have to come out and say it, but there's just too much evidence supporting it.

 

[JamieS]

I need to finish reading this... but really, I wish facebook would just implode. Tomorrow. But only for something else to come and takes its place.

I truly can't believe I'm typing this but that time might actually come. I really thought FB was going to be something that would live for a good 50 years. I deleted the app from my phone a while back and really only use it to advertise to fake Bangladeshi in-market shoppers. I wish I could target real Bangladeshi in-market shoppers! The only real social channels I personally participate in are forums and Reddit with a splash of LinkedIn. The slightly younger crowd is all Instagram and Twitter, and the younglings are all about TikTok. Wonder what the next long-form social media will be? Or are younglings perennially only interested in eye candy/short form?

This is definitely going to get interesting.

 

[Alexander Lau]

 

[GilbertoBatz]

Hello,

Facebook is the best way to generate more traffic in your advertising.

 

[Alexander Lau]

I see a lot of groups barking about impressions and clicks and then there's this.

EDIT: this is also a good way of looking at it.

How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

The metrics are fake.
Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its “Instant Articles,” the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook’s mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day — though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes.