Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money - <AUTHOR> http://jamespanderson.tumblr.com/post/81672314715/facebook-cpc-dont-waste-your-money <comment><USER2> Like others have said, it really depends on what you're selling and who you're targetting.

Our example (country specific mobile app for doctors), spent 100 € on AdWords, end result was literally 0 app installs, 0 sign-ups, 0 everything. Medical keywords are expensive, no chance of sending them directly to the App Store/Play Store (that we saw at least), and no other useful targetting.

Here come Facebook mobile install ads. 40 € spent so far, 500+ app installs, 200+ sign-ups, great retention. We can roughly target medical professionals, take them directly to the app stores, and the clicks are cheap as hell.

I have no doubt that AdWords work much better in other cases, and that FB can be useless, but it's not black and white, you need to know which tool fits the purpose.

<comment><USER3> Are you really getting $0.10 installs via Facebook Mobile ads? If so you're performing better than any FB ad account I've seen in the last 6 months (and I've seen a lot). Even gaming doesn't perform close to this well.

If this is actually true you should be doing affiliate installs which routinely pay out $1 with no (or high) caps. You could literally make tens of thousands of dollars daily.

<comment><USER4> Where can you find affiliate arbitragers like this? Totally get that he/she should be doing this, but how do you find the people doing this effectively? I'm all for paying when someone has figured this out, because the installs I get often make me want to give up trying. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> The installs you get from mobile affiliate are usually shit in terms of performance fwiw. The install flows are things like ads that say [get the app now] then link directly to a random app in the app store, so there is very little intent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Within the last week I performed a similar "experiment" for newly created facebook.com/AmeriStartup.

I created two FB mobile advertisements to direct traffic to the website, though the website is more eCommerce/service than any type of sign up. Budget $50 over 3 days reach was ~20,000+; the click through rate was .5% and .4% for the 2 ads; just under 100 clicks to the website with none resulting in conversion.

More disturbing was the fan page promotion through FB (paid "Likes" in my own words). $10 budget per day over 3 days; reach = 3,000+; total likes 34. What disturbed me though was when I would go to the profile page of the users who "liked" the fan page as a result of the promotion, many of the user profiles did not appear to be legit. Moreover, the majority of these users who liked the page had a single facebook post in their entire facebook timeline. As unlikely as it is that of ~30 paid likes nearly all were were inactive facebook users who were otherwise compelled to interact with my paid promotion, it is equally unlikely that facebook would be so brazen in committing fraud on advertisers by creating and managing fake accounts to click paid promotion/ads which could easily be proven. Nevertheless is begs the question what are these accounts (fake, bots, ect...) and who controls them and why?

<comment><USER6> i believe the current theory is that the illegal bots hide their paid likes by liking innocent pages as well...

<comment><USER7> Yes. Here's a video (by youtube user Veritasium) that walks through an experiment and explanation, for those who are interested.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a single campaign, and a single test, with one set of variables. Concluding something overreaching like "Facebook CPC ads don't work" after a test like that is like saying, "I tried mixing two chemicals, and there was no reaction, chemicals must not cause reactions."

Think of it like a computer program. If 99% of the program is right but one thing is broken, the entire thing won't work. Marketing is, in a lot of respects, the same way. You can be missing one single variable and your entire campaign falls apart.

Look at all of the variables in this campaign - title, image, targeting options, whether you do sidebar ads, newsfeed ads, or mobile newsfeed, and most importantly the product/service offered on the other side (not to mention the conversion rate of the specific landing pages). Apparently this campaign wasn't profitable, but I run a half dozen profitable campaigns on Facebook at any given time (most of them CPC), and I know people who spend $10,000/day on Facebook ads.

Facebook ads _do_ work under the right circumstances. Concluding that they don't after one try is a little absurd.

<comment><USER9> Part of me suspects you didn't actually read the article. While the title is sort of link-baity, the actual content is interesting in that it compares Google Analytics, server logs, and his Google Adwords campaigns to the Facebook one. I don't think his conclusion is that Facebook ads don't work. It's more that Facebook is charging him for false clicks and non-unique clicks. His last sentence sums up _his_ own experience:

"But it definitely doesn't seem like you are getting what you pay for, and certainly the value, at least for my site is not there."

<comment><USER10> Screw the cpc and the fake clicks :) they exist, nothing you can do about it, live with it.

The only thing you should consider to get to any conclusion is the overall CPA.

Facebook is a different beast from AdWords, you cannot simply target people searching for "Online budgeting tool". You have to find a good demographic and that requires lot's of testing. From that point of view $50 is actually meaningless.

Yeah ... he can say that Facebook is charging him for fake clicks ... that's an old news :)

<comment><USER11> You're saying that if Facebook is fraudulently charging advertising customers for more than they are really supplying, that's OK and we should all just deal with it? Really?

FWIW, the last few small scale Facebook campaigns we've run at one of my companies followed a broadly similar pattern to the one described in the article, and we too have checked against our various analytics tools and server logs for comparison, finding the quality of Facebook's referrals far lower than any other source.

However, we do have some other plausible theories about why this might be the case. For example, if visitors to our (B2C, leisure-related) site first see the ad on mobile while they're at work, they're unlikely to explore significantly at the time, but might come back later. We do tend to see a significant spike in both direct visitors and visitors via search engines while we're running FB campaigns that would be compatible with that theory.

Even so, it's very awkward to audit what is really going on with Facebook ads. This is partly because it's hard to determine which clicks claimed by Facebook are actually coming through to our landing page and which are either phantom clicks or other events like Facebook "Likes" that aren't worth anything unless they ultimately translate into paying visitors. It's also hard to track how much money is ultimately charged, because the charges they actually make where they collect real money and the corresponding notifications they send out seem to be based on arbitrary billing periods that don't necessarily correspond to specific days/campaigns where you originally set your budget.

At this point, given the number of reports of strange patterns that do correspond to our own experience, we are sceptical both about how many clicks we get through FB are deliberate rather than "accidental" and about how FB accounts for clicks and calculates its charges. As a small business in a niche market, our FB campaigns only have a small budget and usually they at least break even almost immediately, so we tolerate the uncertainties because our bottom line is usually positive anyway. Even so, the lack of transparency and amount of potential funny business we see at FB is disconcerting, and it certainly makes us hesitant to commit serious money to any FB campaigns in the future.

<comment><USER10> Of course I'm not saying that it's extremely frustrating both to have click fraud and having little data from Facebook to better understand what's going on. I totally agree with that.

However: 1) I don't think Facebook would be so stupid to intentionally fraud on clicks ... the damage could be much bigger than the gain. I'm pretty sure this is mainly due to click farm, bots and so on.

2) I don't care about the click fraud. I don't advertise to get clicks. I advertise to get customers. As long as the overall CPA I get from Facebook is lower than AdWords I'll keep advertising on Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't know about the bot/fraud accusation, but do not listen to the conclusion here. Those bounce rates are not the overall average and it's irrelevant anyway. With any online advertising you need to track conversions. Optimize & spend based on those, not based on hearsay or anecdotes. Hearsay and anecdotes are for deciding to try it and Facebook is so big that you should try it anyway.

There are unlimited examples of failed advertising campaigns on every single medium where failure can be seen measured. Most campaigns fail. They are a cost of doing business. Generalizing based on those would be very mistaken. Facebook is a new but giant ad program. The tools are still rough and "best practices" are even rougher. The consultants...

That doesn't mean that good campaigns can't be run on facebook. Facebook allows campaigns to be run that would be impossible to run anywhere else. In some cases the ROI is ridiculous. In others it's one of few things that works.

The number one reason for all these Facebook sux rants seems to be " _it 's not adwords_." People want their adwords campaign to work on Facebook. If Coca Cola wanted to tell you that they're "the real thing" on adwords, it would be an uphill battle. A budget app on Facebook might be hard going on fb. Maybe not impossible, but it's a squeeze.

If you want to advertise a local children's art exhibition taking place this weekend, Facebook ads will work like magic. 'Friends of friends of the gallery who live close by and have kids.' There is no other platform that gives you anywhere near the reach, relevance and context that FB gives you for a campaign like that. I would expect the "ROI" to be under a dollar per physical ass-through-door.

<comment><USER13> I think people just want to know what they're paying for...

I don't think the article in anyways suggest that they have a perfect advertising campaign.

He's just talking about the discrepancy between what FB reports and what he sees. I don't see how any of what you wrote actually relates or is pertinent to the article.

It looks like you just took offense, along with a lot of other commenters, to criticizing Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the evidence of something being wrong is very compelling. But one of the problems I see is that if Facebook even attempts to fix the problem, their revenue drops by 30% and investors/advertisers sue for fraud.

They're in a tough spot. But they should at least start to turn the ship in the right direction before their total ad business collapses as "ineffective".

<comment><USER15> So you're saying a Walled Garden Monopoly is inherently a distopia. Please pass that along to Silicon Valley VCs and Wall Street.

<comment><USER16> I don't understand how you got to that conclusion after reading the parent comment?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The problem with the article is that the author draws a conclusion with far too little data, akin to signing up for NetFlix and saying it is a terrible service when the first movie doesn't buffer fast enough.

I've spent mid six-figures on Facebook CPC ads over the last several years and can definitively say that they work very, very well - _depending on your use case_. Mine is not the OP's use case (though I've sold a metric a __-ton of SaaS on FB).

I advise everyone here thinking about FB ads to do the following:

\- If you try it, dedicate a serious amount of money. Nothing less than $500 will suffice as you need to get statistically significant data across all your targeting sets.

\- Focus very narrowly on your target market. Trying women age 22-29? Do that in your metro area only. Keep your targeting sets small so you have fewer variables to contend with.

\- Don't lose your nerve. If you give up too quickly you'll know nothing.

Finally, I do understand the OP's frustration with click numbers from FB vs. GA. Don't let it get you down, as this is common on every platform. Optimize for your actual logged data and you'll profit.

<comment><USER18> You didn't read the article. The point of the article has little to do with the campaign performance and more to do with the forensics he/she did to show evidence most of the clicks are misclicks on android phones. If this is true it means even "successful" campaigns are paying this tax.

<comment><USER19> The article is titled "Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money ", I think it's fair for him to explain why it was not a waste of money for him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I made this comment the other day in a thread about children accidentally clicking on google display ads, but I think it also applies here. The problem is measuring the effectiveness of early funnel ads from clicks.

Here is a good presentation from the quantcast guys about the "natural born clicker" problem. The people clicking on your display ad are probably anything but actual potential customers.

Clicks is just an easy holdover metric from the paid search side of digital advertising. It doesn't make sense in the context of early funnel ads. You need to measure the effect your display ads are having on your purchasing endpoints. Which is what the whole cross channel attribution industry is about.

Its quite possible your are getting good value from facebook ads, you've just inadvertently focused in on the worst subpopulation, the clickers.

[1][http://www.slideshare.net/hardnoyz/display-ad-clickers- are-n...](http://www.slideshare.net/hardnoyz/display-ad-clickers-are-not-your- customers)

<comment><USER21> For what it's worth, that earlier Hacker News discussion regarding the Google case can be found at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524473](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524473).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Google also lets me target only Desktop users. If Facebook would allow this > same control, I could run this test again with more confidence.

FB do let you set a Desktop Only audience for ads. You need to use Power Editor (Google Chrome only) and select Desktop under Placements.

I'd like to see a re-run with Desktop targeting only.

Edit: [https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads- api/targe...](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads- api/targeting-specs/#placement)

<comment><USER23> You don't have to use power editor, you just have to update the Targeting to desktop only.

<comment><AUTHOR> I could not find this option anywhere, but I think I see how to do it now, going to give it a try, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> CPC is just the wrong model for Facebook. It turns into "spray and pray". In this case, nobody is looking for a personal budget app, it just shows up uninvited. Whereas with Google, we know someone is likely looking for it when the ad appears.

I don't know what Facebook's long term business model is. IMO, this isn't it.

<comment><USER25> Google's intent based ad platform is relatively effective. Facebook is a little bit like old school TV and Radio advertising. Ad buyers are lured in about 'reaching' target demos. Age, sex, geography, brands they like (affinities). But yeah, it's still somewhat noisey since the users are really just interested in using facebook. Maybe your brand will see some recognition boost, but measuring against a funnel conversion is likely going to be worse than those who use Google and show intent to actually do something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article raises some great points and it's very frustrating to read these articles as the founder of a Facebook Ads Optimization tool aimed at SMBs (AdEspresso - [http://adespresso.com](http://adespresso.com) \- Shameless plug :P).

I'm not going to say that copy was not good or that the number Facebook tracks are correct. I find the copy of the ad used pretty good overall. However I've some consideration about it:

\- I totally agree that Facebook must improve its tracking and must do more to prevent clicks fraud ... a problem which is still very relevant

\- Lot's of Facebook Ads traffic comes from mobile nowadays. This can be good or bad. If you're promoting a website and aiming at conversions on a non mobile-friendly website you MUST disable mobile targeting.

\- Overall $50 budget is not enough to get to any relevant conclusion.

\- On a product like this (budgeting, finance, etc.) it's critical to find a very good audience to target. I'd suggest using a lot custom audiences.

\- Facebook Ads bounce rate & overall quality is very often lower than Google, Yahoo & Bing, this is implicit in the nature of the platform. On Google you're getting traffic from people who are actively searching for a keyword strictly related to your product. On Facebook you're targeting people based on demographic profile and a vague interest. However Facebook is very often much cheaper than Google.

\- CPC & CTR are meaningless metrics. You should always have conversion tracking and measure the overall CPA to acquire a customer. Click frauds, wrong reportings etc. ... they exists. You cannot do anything about it. You should not give a crap about it. Just check your Cost to acquire a customer and see if it makes sense.

\- Sometime for some markets Facebook Ads for direct conversions simply don't work. Create valuable content like eBooks, webinars etc. to get cheaper leads and then close the sales funnel with targeted emails.

My 2 cents, hope it's useful for someone :)

</comment><comment><USER26> How much of Facebook's traffic is mobile these days? I personally prefer the desktop version, but I spend unhealthy amounts of time at the computer anyway. I know that my mom uses FB almost primarily through her iPad since she got it.

If FB's traffic is almost or even largely from mobile devices, paying to show ads for a non-mobile site to that traffic seems just silly. The site is downright hostile to mobile users; the text loads last, it starts with a video and a worthless image, and the actual text ping-pongs across the page to accommodate the clip art and screenshots.

Given this exact same data, the OP could spend a week making at least his landing page mobile, run another FB ad, and make a blog post about A/B testing your landing page for mobile users. But no, it's all Facebook's fault, because bashing Facebook will always, 100% get you upvotes on this site...

<comment><USER27> A recurring complaint in most of the post is the inability to separate desktop users from mobile users. This makes it very difficult to optimize their advertising strategy.

I find it hard to believe that Facebook is not capable of separating mobile (smartphones, wearables and tablets) and desktop traffic in a reliable fashion. I don't know if that's intentional, or why it takes so long to address this problem. But it's hard to deny that right now the only beneficiary of this foggy situation is Facebook.

<comment><USER28> There's a radio button that lets you decide between Mobile, Desktop, or both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The fraudulent clicks are a fact now, and they were in 2009 too, but if your earnings per click margin is high enough FB ads can definitely be worth it.

I did really well running dating ads in every English speaking market, and a lot of Spanish speaking markets as well.

FB ads were the second step in my post-college process of bootstrapping myself as a viable economic entity amidst the fallout and financial devastation of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

So thank you Mark Zuckerberg, if it wasn't for your creation I might have had to get a real job.

</comment><comment><USER30> YMMV, but as an anecdote my wife's FB CPC campaign for her new private psychotherapy practice saw a > 2% click-through rate to her PsychologyToday page, and the number smust have been close to real because they led directly to phone calls from prospective clients who confirmed they'd seen her ad, deliberately clicked it. It took her maybe 6 weeks to fill her schedule and she turned it off.

Note a photo of a smiling female is the best creative for CTR, and narrowing the demographic in her use case was simple: females within 15 miles of her office, aged 25-45, in certain income range. We think the average lead who actually called probably saw her ad 6 or 7 times before clicking.

OP may have valid criticisms of FB ads, but in our case it was a _massive_ success. Spending a couple bucks to acquire a client w a LTV over $1000 is a no-brainer.

Again, YMMV but if you use it right FB can be a fantastic tool.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm getting fed up with these post saying "Media X" is bad (where X is usually something to do with Facebook or Google display).

Two comments:

1\. This media is sold in an auction. If the quality of the traffic vs what you pay for it is bad value then the bids are set too high. If I pay over the odds for something on ebay it isn't just ebay that is at fault.

2\. Doing online advertising well is harder than Facebook and Google are incentivised to make clear. In some cases this stuff is very hard which is why there are people whose full time job it is to get it right.

As someone with some expertise in biddable media reading posts like this must be like a coder reading about how a programming language is flawed because the Todo app scaffolding doesn't quite do what the author expects.

<comment><USER24> The OP is not stating the approach is bad. I think the claim is that Facebook CPC is implemented somewhat fraudulently. What is promised is not what is delivered.

<comment><USER31> Fair point.

As the adverts are sold in an auction, shouldn't the cost per click reflect the proportion of fraud?

E.g. if value of true click is $1 and 50% of clicks are fraudulent then CPC should surely approach $0.50?

<comment><USER32> So long as the fraud is uniformly distributed, that is true. But more significant is the fact that you really can't estimate your costs and benefits correctly when the vendor (Facebook) is giving you incorrect or fraudulent data.

<comment><USER31> I agree with what you say about the estimation of costs.

The benefits to site owners normally take place outside of Facebook and so should be measurable regardless of what Facebook do.

In the case where the benefit is within Facebook then the buyer is purchasing likes or similar and then they are in for a world of hurt (in my experience) because of the difficulty in valuing what is being bought.

In this case the advertiser presumably knows the value of what is bought. Then valuing a click involves working back from that towards a CPC bid based on the conversion rate of the traffic source.

As you say, things get interesting when value is not evenly distributed and are complicated further when incrementality is taken into account. But who said it was meant to be easy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't know enough about your business to know whether you will ever get a positive ROI on Facebook ads, but a clear call to action and more targeted copy will have a world of difference in terms of conversion.

Compare the author's: "Easy to use, free online budget" to "Scared of being in debt? Get your FREE budget report instantly. Click here to request info."

I'm not saying that's the ideal copy, but you have to get people's interest and explain more. Make it specific to a location like "Virginia" or "Sydney" or "Melbourne" or "Kentucky" and target those specific places you'll get a higher CTR and conversion. The mobile vs. desktop part is a whole other discussion.

</comment><comment><USER34> >I created a Facebook CPC campaign ("Clicks to a Website"), and targeted females aged 22-40 in the USA and Australia who like several of my competitors pages and have an interest in Personal Finance.

(Sorry, this is a little off topic.)

Can the OP or someone else fill me in on how he was able to target people who like other pages (that he doesn't own)? Is it through lookalike audience or is there a more direct way to do it? I've been trying to do the same (target similar pages) but I'm clueless as to how to do it.

<comment><USER35> Beware TOS violations (read comments)

[http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/19/how-to-steal-your- comp...](http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/02/19/how-to-steal-your-competitors- facebook-fans/)

<comment><USER36> Neil is brilliant, good find.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Not sure why all the hate towards Facebook lately in HN. I do FB ads exclusively ALL DAY and I can pretty much tell you it works.

FB Ads is a very stubborn creature. There's a lot to learn in order to make it work, their editorial team is trigger happy with account bans... but the volume is massive and the targeting options are amazing.

Running a 60$ is nothing on FB, you need to run volume and optimize.

I"m doing a lot of mobile right now and you can go anywhere from .10 to .50 per install and basically scale to infinity if you like.

</comment><comment><USER38> Interesting post but it's hardly news, a few years back when facebook was struggling to make money I remember reading a detailed article about how facebook delving into advertisement could mean the end of the web as we know it and by that it meant the end of ad-supported websites.

First facebook ads would drive online ads pricing towards the bottom, then it would make obvious something almost all of us know: online advertisement is mostly an overpriced scam that doesn't work and most netizens despise.

Then the usual business model to support costs for running a website would crumble and disappear.

Sadly I can't find this article now (thanks to google tweaking its search engine, it's now hardly possible to find an old results or anythine relevant past the first half of the first results page), but I remember it pointed out that facebook users are much less receptive to ads than google search users. People using a search engine are actively looking for something and ads can be actually be useful to them, but for people looking for social interactions with people they know ads are quite useless and an annoyance.

Right now facebook lack of transparency and accuracy in their ad business means more profit and less trouble for them while hiding the elephant in the room, so don't expect the situation to change soon unless they're given incentive to do so.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm baffled that no one has realized a simple solution to the "click farms".

Simply exclude the countries that are known to be click farms from seeing your page at all.

On your page settings, you'll see a "Country Restrictions" section. [http://i.imgur.com/snkv77Q.png](http://i.imgur.com/snkv77Q.png)

When your page is not visible to a certain area, Facebook will not serve ads to people in that country.

Bam?

<comment><USER39> It takes 5 seconds to fix the problem. [http://sendgrowth.com/blog/simple- defense-facebook-click-far...](http://sendgrowth.com/blog/simple-defense- facebook-click-farms/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is vaguely interesting I suppose, but while 123/21243 (click through rate) is significant, 61/92 (lost clicks) is _not_.

...and therefore every single derived stat is completely nonsense. A percentage you say, on a sample size < 100?

Whats your confidence level on that?

(I also think that Facebook ads are a waste, and the conclusion is plausible; but the stats in the post are meaningless and probably deceptive)

</comment><comment><USER15> Let's fix the title: "Facebook - Don't Waste Your Time or Money." Who wants in on the Facebook cash cow? Well, you need to be on the other side of this international scam. The click farms, the fake likes, the fake pages, the dark side that actually MAKES Zuck rich and he has no incentive to block.

<comment><USER41> Do you think this is a unique problem to Facebook? Google appears to have the same incentives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This isn't a problem. A problem occurs only if people assume a click is worth one amount when really it is worth another amount.

Simply run your campaign for $X and measure your resulting sales, $Y, and now you know if you are wasting money or not.

If Facebook 'fix the problem' then the CPC rate will simply increase.

</comment><comment><USER43> While it's definitely possible that OP's ad campaign sucks, that's not the main point in the article, so how come many comments focus on that?

The post's conclusion is that there's a strong indication of Facebook charging for mis-clicks and double charging for non-unique clicks.

</comment><comment><USER44> Running an ad on mobile for a site that's not optimized for mobile is a HUGE red flag, not some afterthought that should be mentioned in the conclusion. I'd wager anything most of Facebook's traffic comes from smartphones and tablets nowadays.

<comment><USER45> The interesting thing to note is that he has different results for people that come from Google - maybe people have different expectations about the website depending on whether they're looking for it on Google or just sitting in an app like Facebook?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> My very rough and sloppy analysis gives you a credible interval of a conversion rate between 0.28% and 5.61%. At the upper bound of that conversion rate (5.5%), I would handwave and suggest this is comparable to your Google CPC results (depending on the actual cost per click). If I were you, I'd collect more data.

And try different ad text. Acknowledge that this is a different platform than search and you need to advertise differently. Don't be so quick to dismiss it.

Edit: and I was comparing apples to oranges anyway. If I use your Google Analytics data for both measures, we get a range of 0.39%-7.7%. This upper bound actually _exceeds_ your Google CPC result. You don't have enough data.

<comment><USER47> How confident?

<comment><USER46> sig=0.05, but please don't trust that for anything meaningful. This is sloppy 8am blog post response statistics. My personal confidence is basically 0. I just wanted to communicate the idea that 60 impressions was insufficient to make this judgement.

<comment><USER47> If I'd do such a study, I'd pick a lower confidence interval, like 0.2. This is not a big scientific break through, or a business critical decision. This is a theorem that we're evaluating to be worthy of deeper investigation.

If there's an 80% (also known as 'a significant') chance that the conversion rate is significantly lower than that of Google hits then I'd say that warrants deeper investigation.

That's why it's important to always begin research with a hypothesis, not just randomly throw a confidence interval of a something in there :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm getting pretty good results from Facebook CPC. I pay $0.12 per click and get around 50% "conversions" from that. I run a service which doesn't require any registration though and a conversion is just someone doing anything in it.

<comment><USER49> are you only targeting users from outside of US/Canada?

<comment><USER48> No. I'm targeting US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. Age 13-30.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Facebook ads don't work for us anymore because they disabled them, without warning, without explanation, with no apparent recourse. The ads aren't against any TOS and our competitors continue to advertise without issue.

<comment><USER51> Interesting. I wonder if users flagging ads have any impact.

I say this only because I had a habit of flagging ads with the reason of 'other' and entering 'wrong language' when FB showed me ads in the wrong language.

FB ignore browser language for ads, preferring to use IP address. Duh.

It might just be that x% of people flagged a number of your ads for similarly odd reasons and you got banned automatically.

Also I'm testing a theory that FB will at some point just tag me as an 'ad hater', because any ads that show in the timeline I mark as 'don't show me again', reason 'not interested', purely because I don't like the feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I just tested the water with Facebook Ads for my startup AppBlade.com as well, budgeted some $500. Did my best to target mobile application developers, this was my exact experience. Thousands of clicks, not a single sign-up. Also the CPC was higher than Google for our keywords.

Google in the same timeframe has had a measurable ROI and is converting at ~10% for us; even mobile clicks.

This is just data, it's worth experimenting for yourself but I definitely feel that something sketch is going on. Make sure to use utm_ codes and something like MixPanel so you can track the originating source for your paying customers.

</comment><comment><USER53> I've had good luck with Facebook ads. I think the targeting is key. If you target people who are already familiar with your brand, it helps a lot. You can target, for example people who already "Like" your page. And you can target their friends as well. Facebook also has a feature that lets you serve ads to people by their e-mail address.

If you stick with those, you're pretty much guaranteed to be targeting real people, and not bots or fraudsters.

Also, learn to use the Facebook Power Editor, as you get a lot more control over how your posts appear, how your ads work, etc.

</comment><comment><USER54> A CTR of 0.4% is absolutely abysmal for a newsfeed ad and the fact that the author thinks that it is "quite high for an ad like this" makes me think he has no idea what he's talking about.

</comment><comment><USER55> Those visitors probably didn't make it to your server, and got lost during redirects (canceled the request). This makes sense if they are using 3G. As there are at least 1 (sometimes 2) redirects between the click and your site. They track the visitor before they get redirected obviously.

I have dev'd for an advertising company, have worked with several campaigning networks like HasOffers, and have found similar results. This is more than common.

Still very interesting that the bulk seems to be Android (mobile traffic). A must know if you are not targeting mobile..

</comment><comment><USER56> Desktop and iPhone traffic are better converting than Android traffic, so advertisers bid higher to display on these platforms.

For this type of website, he should be bidding desktop - will pay maybe 40% more per click, but much better site engagement.

FB Ads still have a long way before the tools are as robust as Adwords, but learn the platform and run more tests before you trash it. Unless you're going for something ultra-targeted it's rare to nail a CPC platform on the first go.

</comment><comment><USER57> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514)

</comment><comment><USER58> I think it highly depends upon how you're targeting and what kind of product your selling. I've got a friend who is using fb CPC for physical products (that includes a concierge service) and my jaw hit the floor when he told me the ROI. Admittedly, they have a pretty high revenue per customer, but my point stands that it depends on what you're selling.

</comment><comment><USER13> So to sum up the article: advertising in an information cesspool renders bad results.

Call me a hater, I am one, and completely revel in the privilege :)

</comment><comment><USER59> I have used Facebook CPC extensively for my e-commerce company and it has worked wonderfully ( with the right settings ). I have had over 5% of clicks convert in certain months.

However, I have had little luck with adsense for the same company. Honestly I think picking an ad network for your market is a much bigger decision than "tuning" a network you are set on using!

</comment><comment><USER60> Oh boy. Another one of these posts.

While you can self-serve advertising, it is not necessarily a good idea, in the same way that representing yourself in court is not necessarily a good idea.

Facebook cares much less about fraud than Google does, because FB has been under much less external pressure from shareholders to do it. That is not to say that various Google properties do not have fraud issues still. This is reflected in the price differentials.

After all, entire IPOs built around Adsense fraud occurred in the mid-2000s. There have been countless small businesses built around link fraud. It is quite likely that some of the major media names built on social traffic are also based in part upon defrauding social advertisers, because as of yet, few have cared about it, and many investors will just reward companies based on trivially faked traffic metrics.

But guess what? Circulation fraud is a problem that has been with us for over a century in media. Some combination of the price system, auditing, direct response ad testing, corporate incompetence, the good ol' boy network, and other methods have kept it from making advertising either totally useless or totally risk free.

Despite this, here are some issues that could help you advertise better in the future:

1\. This is not a good ad. The copy is bad. The illustration is bad. The call to action is unwieldy. The logo placement is haphazard. The headline is Wrong. The human figure is in the wrong position. The button placement is haphazard. You would be better off plagiarizing ads from Mint and swapping out the logos and colors. If you want to keep the lady accountant mascot, put her to the left of whatever copy you want the visitor to read, and make her look at it.

2\. The demographics you selected might as well have been at random. Market research is not throwing a dart at the entire planet and targeting whatever the dart landed on.

3\. FB != Adwords in the same way that a newspaper != the yellow pages != a niche interest magazine != radio != flyers != e-mail spam != direct mail != a catalog and so on and so on and so on.

4\. Your budget is so small that it barely qualifies as a test campaign. You ran a test campaign and discovered a hazard to avoid. That is the point of the early tests. If you run out of budget before you can discover a profitable marketing strategy, your tests will uncover that you are out of business.

In this case, you are dazzling yourself with your measurements because it is easier for you to do so than it is to think at a higher level about your objectives and the methods that you want to use to achieve them given your resources. You could call this Silicon Valley Degenerative Metrics Dementia. Sadly, there is no known cure for SVDMD.

I could personally care less if Facebook goes out of business, but as long as real people with wallets continue to use it, it will have some utility to advertisers, so long as they put forth at least some good faith effort to control their bot/fraud/misclick problems.

Considering some of the things that I have seen with Facebook, I am not confident that they really care, because many investors will reward them when they count bot users (or human users living in third world conditions) as if they were humans with first world bankrolls. There is no comparable Matt Cutts figure for Facebook. I think the real money on the platform, like was the case with Google for a long time, is on the criminal side.

Hopefully some short sellers are paying attention to these stories, because terror is the only thing that will induce Facebook to stop its absurd gyrations on the product side and actually police their platform. Short sellers can orchestrate a PR campaign and either pressure Facebook to start caring or can just make a lot of money by torpedoing the firm through aggressively publicizing its failures.

All that being said, I hope that this is helpful to you, and I am glad that more businesses are learning that online advertising is difficult, complex, and risky (like advertising everywhere and always in all mediums over all time periods using all sorts of technologies).

<comment><USER61> _All that being said, I hope that this is helpful to you_

I'm not the OP, but WRT point number one, what in your mind would qualify as better copy, and better a better call to action, and logo?

<comment><USER60> Not qualified to comment on the logo design.

It's just in a haphazard location. Humans read left to right and are attracted to faces. The logo is off there in the lower left corner. The lady is to the right of the copy. If this ad were in Hebrew, that would be fine, because that language reads right to left. English goes left to right.

'Better' copy is what tests better with the market. I do not know what is better. I have inklings on what direction to move in to improve the campaign.

I would test the current image copy vs. 'Join the 100,000+ people like you who have saved money with BudgetSimple.'

Body copy test: You can become financially secure using our free budget planning service.

Button test: 'I want my free budget' or 'Teach me to save money' \-- 'learn more' is too generic.

Like most ads for tech of most kinds this is a little too heavy on the features and not enough on the 'what's in it for me?' No one cares about 'getting a better understanding of their finances' except accountants. No one gets excited about budgets except for politicians eager to spend money that belongs to other people.

Individuals want more money. They want safety. They want financial security. They want control over their own life.

If the OP wants to run a female-targed campaign, it'd be a great opportunity to pose as the authority and quote a magazine article about the problems that some women have with credit card debt or general financial planning, and reference that in the ad. This just comes to mind because a friend of mine wrote a feature for Cosmo on this topic a couple years ago. Ads that do not come off as pushy and instead present themselves as trustworthy, useful information can win over the trust of the target audience better.

If it is really just Oz, then Oz up the ad. Australians would care more about joining 20,000 other Australians just like them than 100,000 Yanks, for example.

There is a dude who runs a budgeting business off of Something Awful banner ads that I remember from a few years back that uses goon jargon to establish rapport with the target audience. He succeeded by matching the tone and content of his message to the readers in the right context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> You should try out the Facebook Power Editor for Facebook ads. There you have the option to target just desktop users.

It is a bit more complex but you will get more possibilities with this editor: [https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/powereditor/](https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/powereditor/)

</comment><comment><USER63> Why are you wasting your money sending mobile users? Even mobile web users are useless as most are drive-by visitors that might not get the FULL impression they'll get through a desktop browser.

Even if you optimize for mobile web, I'm sure they won't experience the true power and wow-ness of your app unless they visit it thru a desktop.

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm a huge fan of only using FB for retargeting. You know you aren't targeting spammers, and there's some sort of legitimate interest there. The only risk here is some cannibalization and duplication, but if you use some higher end analytics and pay attention to it that shouldn't be too much of an issue.

<comment><USER60> This is basically the correct way to go about it when you have a small budget.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Paying for traffic by the click/impression/<anything other than conversion> is the most dangerous thing to do on the internet if you don't fully trust the integrity of the payee or the quality of its network.

</comment><comment><USER66> For my travel startup DealScoopr, we saw similar similar results from Facebook CPC Ads - low conversion rates, mostly Android traffic. Google Adwords turned out to be much more effective.

</comment><comment><USER67> "First, note that Facebook seemed to have charged me for non-unique users clicking the ad, as well as myself clicking the ad."

This sounds like a bug (or a feature, i.e. fraud).

</comment><comment><USER68> Ya we stopped all ads as well, they just had shitty results. And most of the likes for those campaigns were from people who looked fake.

</comment><comment><USER69> Try both, double down on what works. Why wouldn't you try fb ads? Many companies have success, see if you can be one.

</comment><comment><USER70> we had very similar experience with facebook ads and stopped it completely. here is our post on that [http://blog.animatron.com/post/79877876767/the- mysterious-ca...](http://blog.animatron.com/post/79877876767/the-mysterious- case-of-the-lost-facebook-link-clicks)

</comment><comment><USER71> I grepped here and the target page for CPC but I didn't get a critical question answered:

 _What is Facebook CPC??_

</comment><comment><USER72> Lol paying for marketing. Go find your customers, it's free.

</comment><comment><USER36> with the traffic this cat is getting now for running a crap campaign on FB i think ill do a bogus writeup on how bad my campaign was put together and put it in HN too :/

</comment><comment><USER73> I'm loving my FB short. What a terribly managed company. So frivolous with their cash, and immature overall

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not saying Facebook is astroturfing, but there seems to be a lot "new" accounts when these thing come up.

</comment><comment><USER74>
        How can Facebook fix this? They need to work like Google.

but they simply cannot/unwilling to do this because they are NOT google, otherwise they'd already have done this. I think come earnings report, they will have a lot to answer to, possibly lawsuit or investigation happening.

</comment><comment><USER75> > _I think half of the Facebook business model is based on people accidentally > clicking things_ .. _How can Facebook fix this?_

\- Why fix something that's not broken? It's working exactly as Facebook intended it.

</comment><comment><USER76> Why would you send mobile FB clicks to your website? Send them to a mobile app on mobile (!!!)

You can target only desktop users, if you want to send people to a website

<comment><USER38> I assume you are a mobile app developer looking for a job.

I don't know a single user who enjoy being sent to a mobile app instead of the website.

If being hated by your users is not enough of a deterrent, then factor in the cost of building said apps on mobile platforms and maintaining them through time and new smartphones versions while having a website versus simply having a website.

Unless you're a big corp with tons of money to throw out the windows, the wise path is a well thought and designed website.

<comment><USER76> Not really, I used to work at one of the main Facebook SPMDs so I'm saying that out of having seen the performance of mobile app campaigns on advertisers that spend $100k+ a day on fb.

I don't see why you would be hated by your users? The ad makes it super clear that it's an app, it takes you straight to the app store where you can read reviews / description / screenshots and then you just install it.

I think you are making the mistake of thinking that the average user is like you, most people will just want to get the app ASAP when they see an ad for something that seems useful; not having to navigate a website which doesn't have a mobile version (try budgetsimple.com in an android phone, it's impossible to use !)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> The moral of this story?

Don't do business with scumbags.

Facebook is professional scumbaggery.

Just a taste

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Privacy_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Privacy_concerns)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Data_min...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Data_mining)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Inabilit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Inability_to_voluntarily_terminate_accounts)

[http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/06/03/facebook-ceo-mark- zuc...](http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/06/03/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg- denial/)

[http://www.socialmedianews.com.au/zuckerberg-in-trouble- over...](http://www.socialmedianews.com.au/zuckerberg-in-trouble-over-leaked- im-chat/)

[http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/why-you- should-...](http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/why-you-should-never- trust-facebook/4708/)

</comment><comment><USER78> People with no idea of how to run ad campaigns should not be bad mouthing X ad platform.

There are so many ways this post is wrong. First, a .4% CTR for a newsfeed ad sucks. That means either your demo targeting sucks, or your ad sucks, or both. Second, if android visits don't convert, change targeting to desktop visitors only. Third, traffic sources behave differently. You can't jump to the conclusion that they're scamming you just because one traffic source worked and another one didn't. Another possibility is that you haven't tried hard enough.</comment>


Ask HN: How on earth can you follow the "RfR: Basic Income" thread? - <AUTHOR> (For reference, it is this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10982340)
I've started to read through it several times, as new content gets added constantly. But it's getting more difficult by the moment. Most of what I see seems not new, but I see the counter going up.
If you are actively participating you can follow your threads, but what about the 99% of us that didn't? It is not easy at all.
Just to put things in perspective, to jump from the first subthread (tptacek) to the next one (surfmike) I've had to put my finger on the screen to track indentation and hit New Page 72 TIMES. And that's only gets me to about a third down the page.
I believe it is showing one of the limitations of this minimalistic platform - it works great for small threads, but big ones get unwieldy.
Part of it is the failure to spin off new threads on separate themes, that normally happens whenever people start browsing on their own for new information, and post new interesting links to HN.
It would be great to see some UX changes like folding comments, or others that, I don't know, help structure posts so subthreads can be spinned off to a new post or something.
Any ideas? It would be great to have one of these big comment stories be the tipping point for some functionality to change! <comment><USER2> There are some browser extensions available for collapsing comments. Here's one for chrome:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- collap...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- collapsible-c/hockhafcdegocajmjhafgjncjpodihkd?hl=en)

I'm not sure why this isn't a core feature of HN; I think it might be in the works at some point now?

</comment><comment><USER3> Open subthreads in a new window by right clicking on their timestamp.

As for the political, I submit everything is political. Often, it can be ignored. For this topic, it can't. Discussing it does not mean much, unless we also discuss the politics. It is the politics that will gate what is possible.

People take politics way too personally too. Not always, but enough that the contact sport nature of it can be a problem. I tend to try to understand others as a way to help marginalize this impact. We do find common ground or can improve on advocacy this way.

Take each major thread and process it. Filter politics by reading lightly. There is some good thought in that discussion. Worth it.

Use a number of browser tabs to get multiple views into the dialog. This can help you reference things without so many navigation hassles.

And doing this is a skill too. Developing that is worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear you, but I don't think the burden of navigating the thread and keeping tabs on subthreads should be put on the user and his/her navigator tabs...

<comment><USER3> I'm a practical person. The move to simplify UI has it's costs. This is one of them.

Your point is entirely valid. But, there is a lot of momentum in the wrong directions right now too. This pendulum will swing again, and maybe we will once again value threaded discussion enough to put a more effective UI on it.

One thing I've noticed is flat UI has impacted many aspects of online discussion. Many people don't even understand threaded, and moves to serve the "sweet spot" use cases are efficient, but they also take the good features away or do not deliver them to people ready or wanting to take advantage of them.

Personally, I'll just find the flow that makes the most sense, employ it, move on, and hope for better times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's definitely a problem. Especially for mobile browsers that can't install the enhancements.

It would be great just to see the top voted comments in a thread.

</comment><comment><USER5> or you could argue this content is too political for this platform and should move to another platform.

<comment><USER6> I agree. I just ignore most threads with more than a hundred of comments. They are usually borderline political and most of the comments are just opinions.

The comments in small threads have usually more technical content based on facts.

<comment><USER5> I read "new" pretty often which helps keep commenting down.</comment></comment></comment>


The Internet is Shit (2003) - chroem- http://www.internetisshit.org/print.html <comment><USER2> _If I can operate Google, I can find anything_

Or the collorary "if I can't find it on Google, it doesn't exist" \- which seems to be the perception among people these days, and in some ways it's quite scary how much power Google has over what information people can find on the internet. I've noticed a decline in the diversity and breadth of their search results over the years, where sites that I used to visit containing detailed technical information - many of them are still around - <AUTHOR> basically disappeared from the search results, overtaken by highly SEO'd sites that have only superficial information (a lot of the time they contain words that only approximately match some of the query, which makes it even worse.) It seems that in attempting to prevent spam, a lot of the genuinely good content (that just "wasn't SEO'd enough") has been buried too. The mundane, shallow, and practically worthless content is emphasised over the detailed, in-depth information that I believe certainly exists out there. If the internet was shit in 2003, it's even more shit now.

<comment><USER3> Most of those high-quality sites that contain detailed technical information have something in common: they don't carry Google's advertising, so Google earns no revenue when you visit them. Despite Google's protestations over the last few years, I haven't heard a better explanation for the shift in the nature of the results they return.

<comment> vertex-four In reality, the issue is simply that the sites that contain in-depth writings don't get updated as often as the blogs, forums, and content farms that contain superficial information. Google's engines are tweaked to always prefer sites that are updated very regularly, so as to sift out obsolete information.

<comment><USER4> Why is this? In many fields, information does not become "obsolete".

Google's policy on this issue seems to be pushing the internet in a superficial direction.

<comment><USER5> Google is a tech company, tech is seemingly outdated as soon as it arrives. They push the tech line of thinking everywhere they go, even if it doesn't belong.

<comment><USER6> Well to be fair, trying to differentiate between information which does become outdated and information which is static is non-trivial to do algorithmically. Choosing between promoting new and updated information and promoting static information I think the former is a better choice for most things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "I can walk into any public library, no matter how tiny and underfunded, and find facts, stories, amazing information I would never touch in a month of webcrawling."

This remains absolutely true. Wikipedia and the internet in general has done a great job of making shallow information readily available, and providing access to out-of-copyright works.

But for the vast majority of topics, it hasn't come close to providing the kind of information available in books, except when Google is actually scanning and OCR'ing those books.

<comment><USER8> > Wikipedia and the internet in general has done a great job of making shallow > information readily available

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. The word 'encyclopaedia' literally means a volume of shallow, broad-base, all-round knowledge.

> But for the vast majority of topics, it hasn't come close to providing the > kind of information available in books

I disagree strongly. Writing a book is an incredibly time-consuming and difficult endeavour, and not all people who have knowledge worth sharing have the skill or time to do it. By praising books as a supreme medium you put authors on an intellectual pedestal while suffering from (or being blessed with) their editorial choices and interests. Some great things have come from people scribbling on napkins, exchanging letters, or scribbling in journals. The Internet means these sorts of mediums can proliferate. If you want depth on the Internet, go to discussion forums, go to IRC, send e-mail, read mailing lists, watch talks, go directly to the personal blogs of experts, post comments, download electronic journals... these are the alternatives the Internet provides to going to a library. Don't wait for someone to patch Wikipedia.

In all honesty, there are only two valuable aspects I have ever found and love in a library: geographically local reference material, like newspaper archives etc, and a nice quiet place to study, away from distraction.

<comment><USER9> It depends strongly on the subject. For the majority of science and engineering subjects, books win hands down. Some recent examples:

1\. Chemistry. Want to know the details of a common battery chemistry? The regular google results aren't helpful -- they're a combination of grade-school demos and premeds incorrectly explaining electrochem MCAT problems to each other. The google scholar results aren't helpful because the relevant literature is too old to be indexed, the trail of scientific discovery is too difficult to quickly and correctly follow, and/or it's in german (with shit OCR so google translate doesn't work).

Meanwhile typing "battery chemistry" into the library search system brings up several relevant tomes, the first one of which has exactly the discussion I'm looking for condensed into the space of several pages. A quick google search reveals that this page was never posted to the searchable internet.

2\. Math (or Chemistry or Physics). Want to know the precise definition of a symbol you keep seeing? Too bad: google doesn't know how to search for formulas or symbols (btw, I'd love to be wrong here). Naturally, the journal article you're reading doesn't bother to define it, so you're SOL.

Unless you find a similar discussion in a book -- in that case, you just look in the front or the back and 80% of the time you'll find exactly the precise definition you need. The other 20% of the time you have to binary search backwards until you find the point in the book at which the symbol was defined. Easy enough.

3\. Engineering. Want to find a cohesive discussion of X? If you go to google, you'll find 30 ppt presentations with piss-poor production value, big useless unexplained formulas with undefined terms and not enough discussion to fill in the blanks. In contrast, if you check out a book you can find a cohesive introduction via the index. If you're lucky, it even includes motivation: "we argue that X is a linear transform, we project it onto basis Y, blah bla blah" rather than a big nasty tensor equation. Maybe you read the first few paragraphs in the chapter if it's too hard and you need pointers to further supplementary info.

4\. Computer Engineering. If nobody is willing to pay to make good digital documentation, sometimes engineers are still able to get funding for a book. I learned about Mach and mDNS this way -- the books were amazing compared to the digital docs and well worth 5x their price (by which I mean their printed price, not the $0 I paid to check them out).

5\. Open Source. Books are a great open source business model because two magical things happen that wouldn't happen otherwise: 1. the author of the documentation gets paid, 2. the culture of bookwriting imposes minimum quality standards on their documentation. You get to learn the story. You feel like you're along for the ride, not someone who got dropped into a room full of people who already know what's going on and cantankerously respond to your questions with "google it" despite the fact that your post documented the search terms which failed to produce useful results.

\</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

Books have a degree of cohesion and completeness that websites and journal articles lack. Since it sucks to follow printed citations, authors err on the side of including everything you need. The culture of bookwriting figured out long ago that you need to include the boring stuff too -- and that's a lesson the internet has yet to learn (if it ever will).

Also, the internet hasn't been around for long enough to capture every subject's burst of initial excitement + willingness to write about it. The list of things the blog-o-sphere doesn't know or care about (literally) fills libraries.

Science & Engineering bloggers willing to write highly informative articles are a scarce bunch. Historically, that communication happened in books, so that's where you often need to go to get what you want. The situation _a lot_ better in computer engineering; y'all don't know how spoiled you are :P

<comment><USER10> I think the bigger gripe (and summary of your comment) is the following: books and the internet present information in a completely different way.

A book is by definition an end-to-end, self-contained experience. Even on highly-specific scientific topics, try to find one that doesn't bookend with context.

The internet has evolved into a place where it's normal to create an extremely specific piece of content without context. After all, that's what linking is for ("Or they could always go read Wikipedia!" Ha). Moreover, I would argue that the expert context that's necessary for ideal grokking in fact doesn't exist. On a information-wide scale, no one creates just context for other things: Khan Academy provides it by building end-to-end learning experiences, and blog posts create it in an extremely limited and piecemeal manner (we've all been fortunate to read one of those "Eureka!" expert blog summaries).

Indeed, it may not even be possible for such content to self-generate without external impetus. Where do shallow articles come from? Lay-persons (for lack of a better term) researching and writing for other lay-people (minimal time investment, maximum audience = $$). Where do hyper-specific articles come from? Trained-persons writing for other trained-people (maximum time investment, minimum audience = $grant$).

Does anyone have a motive for where and why "trained-persons writing for lay- people" (e.g. deGrasse Tyson or Sagan: maximum time investment, quasi-maximum audience) would be created? Aside from altruism and digitized introductory academia?

If you want to find a tragedy of the internet, it's the fact that it never evolved a systematic context-creation process. And so we don't have any. There may have been proposals in the original design of hyperlinking, and there were the 90s/00s "curated human indices of links". However, the "good enough" of modern search engines seems to have precluded the time investment necessary.

<comment><USER9> Exactly! It's half a problem of legacy and half a problem of motivation.

Books and review articles (if you're lucky) are the only things I know of that plug the gap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why did you change the link to the plain single-page version? The pacing and design of the original was very intentional. This is how it was meant to be experienced: [http://www.internetisshit.org/](http://www.internetisshit.org/)

Also, for fun you ought to WHOIS the domain name. Here's a sampling:

      Registrant Name: alain a-dale
      Registrant Organization: iis
      Registrant Street: Sherwood
      Registrant Street: Forest
      Registrant City: Nottingham
      Registrant State/Province: State
      Registrant Postal Code: 111111
      Registrant Country: US

<comment><USER12> I still find it refreshing that you can buy a domain name without publishing private contact information. I do not look forward to the day I go to buy a random domain and find that they want a verified ID.

<comment><USER13> There are proxy registrars for that, if you're worried about it. After all, it's not required that your actual contact information be present in the WHOIS record, only that you can be reached via the contact information provided there.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely, and I also make use of these when needed. But they cost extra money and for quick and dirty projects it's refreshing to not have to pay for privacy. We now live in a world of "real names" and "show me your passport to use my service".

<comment><USER13> I see your point, but WHOIS contact information requirements are hardly a new thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It might be a good headline to get attention but the Internet is not shit. When I was first exposed to it (in 1989, even before the World Wide Web was a thing) it blew my mind. My first thought was that this is going to be as powerful as the invention of the wheel. This incredible tool, as might be expected when understanding it's immense scope and potential, has over the years become more and more a mirror of the civilisation that uses it. This of course causes it to include unbelievably huge doses of shit (content which is shallow, stupid, ignorant, petty, immoral, illegal etc.), but also gives us access to an unparalleled abundance of deep, interesting, educational, inspiring and fascinating stuff on any topic at unbelievable speed.

Of course you might still find things in libraries that you can't find on the Internet but what I know is that today I can find in seconds what would have taken me days to find once in a library (and this is assuming the library even had enough information on the specific topic I'm interested in). There are things I can (and do) find today and people I can contact with a quick search which I never could have found or known to exist in the "library only" era. It might require honing your search and "shit filtering" abilities but that's a small price to pay for what you get.

The article seems to be expressed disappointment of the disappearance of the "good ol' days" but I was never one to reminisce about the "good ol' days", I'm only interested in the good new days and believe that, taking everything into consideration, they're only getting better. Exponentially so.

<comment><USER15> I for one am tired of people ripping the medium, whether it be cellphones or instagram or the internet, people need to realize that it's the message, not the medium.

Wait, OP said that. Ironically, that very statement is a fantastic counterargument to everything s/he says. Saying that the internet is unreliable is like saying books are unreliable. It's such a general statement that it can't be taken seriously.

<comment><USER16> People often forget that most of life is just boring or trivial, so when they're exposed to a new medium they see all the boringness and triviality and then dismiss the entire medium. In reality a representative example off literature is a shitty fantasy novel, not Shakespeare. It's only because we've had centuries to accumulate lots of great material and billions of hours of work putting into judging, reviewing, and curating works of literature that are of value that we value and respect the medium.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Fiction is self-perpetuating."

I've found really interesting ways that this manifests itself.

I'm a film-camera lover. Well, my Fuji GW690 mk3 is fantastic, except that when I trip the shutter, there's an awful "ping" sound that it makes. I read forum after forum and watched youtube videos that all said the same thing: "Remove the counter assembly and it will remove the ping."

Getting a hair up my derrier, I decided to do this and found, after much work, that the ping sound was in the shutter assembly and could not be mitigated.

Check the work here. [http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1447...](http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=144759)

Anyway, just one internet myth amongst millions I'm sure. I was just so surprised that people would parrot other peoples lies like that. If that's the case with something so minor, I can only imagine the amount of misinformation out there (where people have something to gain).

<comment><USER2> Thanks for providing an actual example of this. As someone whose hobbies include fixing and improving things, that sounds like a spring that's ringing. I think you could dampen it if you could identify the exact one and put some sound-absorbing material on it, or if you find the end-stop some part is hitting sharply on, put something soft on that.

As another datapoint, service manuals for various equipment (including cameras) are another difficult thing to find, as Google _really_ thinks you want the usual brief and increasingly useless instruction manual even if you very explicitly type "service manual" in your query.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> ...And it's only gotten worse from there.

You know what I miss? Personal home pages. When's the last time you saw one of those? Somebody taking a bunch of stuff they'd made or written about, embedding it in HTML, and slapping it up on the web?

The closest thing we have now is blogs, and they're not all that close.

<comment><USER19> Every university professor's web page is like that. They all look awful.

<comment><USER20> Funny. Respectfully, I think they look great.

I always get the information I need - books and research they've been involved in, career history, a few personal details (family, hobbies, interests, where they live), and some links to more websites I never would have found otherwise. Maybe they don't have exciting animations, memorable logos, or even colored backgrounds, but it beats searching my university's over-engineered, information-starved profile on them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Fiction is self-perpetuating"

There are several ways that people react to this. One way is to see it as a fundamental and unique fault to the internet and use it as a reason to write off the internet as a useful or serious medium. This is a mistake. Another is to see it as an opportunity to reevaluate our assumptions of trustworthiness in general.

The truth is that no encyclopedia is more trustworthy than Wikipedia, no news medium is more trustworthy than the internet. We've merely been willing to abide by the faults and biases of familiar media. But what you see on tv, what you read in the paper, what you read in books; all of it is just as vulnerable to persistence of fiction as the internet. In some cases we tend not to be aware of such things merely because it's harder to check.

</comment><comment><USER21> > _But still we praise the internet for everything, from mobilising global > protests to creating the latest trends_

Except that's true and it's much more apparent today than in 2003. What happens throughout the world is that the mass-media is basically owned by oligarchies, with journalists being sellouts shaming their profession.

And for example, what happened in my country for several times has been mass censorship of opinions and facts that went contrary to the whims of the established power. Not by any decree mind you, it's not that kind of censorship, I'm talking about major television and newspaper channels simply ignoring events or twisting facts in gross manipulation attempts. Imagine 30,000 people protesting on the street with no media coverage. Imagine people standing in line for 8 hours to vote at the London embassy, while the major television channels and the government's spokesman were reporting that there are no lines.

And so in my country at least, the only channel for reaching the truth really is the Internet. And it may be full of shit in general, but that goes with its open nature, as an Internet that isn't full of shit is not the kind of Internet I want.

As to the points raised, those kind of scream "first-world problems". If you have public libraries within reach, stuffed with useful material, you may not realize it, but you're lucky.

<comment><USER22> I think you are right and the OP comparison is not very relevant.

She (?) compares a library (so a place that stores only the relevant / interesting books) to the internet in general. I mean 90% of everything ever written is probably shit too, it's just not in the library.

However I observe a kind of "wikipedia I know everything" generation, I think it is somewhat connected to the article and it's very sad.

<comment><USER23> The idea that "90% of everything is crap" is often attributed to science- fiction writer Ted Sturgeon.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The problem with the internet is that its positive attributes are so awe- inducing that they make it impossible to realize its limitations.

I believe we could have something much, much better, and there are concrete steps we could take to improve things.

For a concrete exploration of how much better things COULD be, I suggest the following video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJGIeSCgskc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJGIeSCgskc) (BTW I am just saying these people realize the internet is shit and are trying to do something about it, I'm not suggesting their particular solutions are the ones that will win out in the end.)

</comment><comment><USER25> Why did he use internet to communicate it to such a large number of people? He should have written a book and stuck it in some unknown underfunded public library.

<comment><USER26> I guess because he'd like to see a better internet

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Anything of mass will have taints I guess. That's I like low bandwidth medium (ML, IRC), they allow less bloat. Makes me reconsider the meaning of progress.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if there's a discussion about net neutrality somewhere in there.

Although I really think the real issue with the internet right now is its monolithic, centralized, html oriented architecture. I want more decentralized technologies.

I'm curious, but I don't think the amount of websites increased like the amount of internet users did.

Also the fact that people are alone despite the success of social network, is the proof that the internet is failing.

</comment><comment><USER28> This was written when 'Internet' meant Internet Explorer 6, before Facebook or the iPhone or youtube.

Sine then, shit has evolved. The smart phones brought 'the shit' into everyone's pockets and the social networks made the shit ubiquitous. We now have access to all the movies, music, documentaries (back in 2003, broadband was still surfacing, HD video streaming was a still a wet dream back then). Basically, anyone, anywhere can consume everything that was ever learned or created and communicate with anyone anywhere on the Planet. This is incredible.

The awesome part of the Internet (and technology in general) is the part of the iceberg that's above water. Below water lurks a chunk of ice so big and dark that few people want to look at it or acknowledge that it is indeed an iceberg, not a fluffy white mountain of awesomeness.

Below water there is misinformation, mass surveillance, information wars, espionage, monopoly and control on a global scale.

But the darkest part is that we are totally addicted to this shit. We sleep with our phones. We 'go online' (2003 term) when we wake up and offline when we're asleep.

We have to read, watch, comment and discuss everything and then go ahead and forget everything the next day, because, well, there's more shit to read, watch and comment on.

By 2014, the Internet, with all it's infinite amount of information, has created a generation of clueless, spoiled information and entertainment junkies who live in a system of control beyond any dictator's wildest dreams.

I've seen a stroller with a smartphone holder yesterday and the 1-year-old was watching videos while his father was pushing the stroller through the park. Instinctively I understand that that is fucked up, but I can't explain why, because I know "that's the future".

Part of it. But there are other parts of the same future that scare the shit out of me. The fact that it has accelerated the rate of planetary destruction to unprecedented levels, by making globalisation possible and required. The fact that tech is now controlled by several corporations with mantras like 'don't be evil', which is telling, because it means that it is possible to be evil with this tech and the amount of evil that can be done is equal to the amount of good that it brings. This tech is godsend for evil people and in many countries, control of the Internet is the most important condition for holding power with an iron fist.

Maybe, just like the splitting of the atom, the Internet is one of those things that shouldn't have been invented?

</comment><comment><USER29> Single-page version:

[http://www.internetisshit.org/print.html](http://www.internetisshit.org/print.html)

<comment><USER30> Thanks; changed.

Interestingly, the previous post was 7 years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=159353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=159353). I wonder if that's a record.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Obligatory "everything today is terrible and it's those kid's fault" quotes from every single time period, in every single culture, since the dawn of recorded history.

</comment><comment><USER32> It says "the medium isn't the message", yet the article is happily criticizing its content, but speaking of it as the medium.

<comment><USER32> also s/he should have published it in his local library :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is it ironic that this guy bought a domain name specifically for this? or does he just know his audience.

<comment><USER34> "A URL is not a mark of quality. It's not proof of honesty or approval from the FDA."

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> i'm just waiting for a sun spot to fry half our tech infrastructure (again!), perhaps then we will see the value of alternative channels for education, information and social function.

</comment><comment><USER36> Yeah, that's a problem. You cannot be happy in the INternet. Only with other people.</comment>


Apple Could Accidentally Disrupt the Entire TV Industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_could_accidentally_disrupt_the_entire_tv_industry/ <comment><USER2> Macobserver will accidentally stop spamming HN before Apple accidentally spends years and a mountain of cash hoping to disrupt another industry.</comment>


Mining Question/Answer pairs from #tikiwiki history - <AUTHOR> https://dev.tiki.org/IRC+QA+Mining

<comment><AUTHOR> From the page, a live demo is available at: <http://tikiqa.duboue.net/></comment>


Serverless and Recurrent Neural Networks with Fn, GraphPipe and TensorFlow - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/fnproject/serverless-and-recurrent-neural-networks-with-tensorflow-and-graphpipe-fc73785f1a16 <comment><USER2> fnproject.io looks nice. I like the fact it's language agnostic, which is a huge benefit and gives you more flexibility.

I have created [https://triggerfs.io](https://triggerfs.io) with which can do that, too. building whole serverless infrastructures whether it's on the cloud or on-prem or in a colocation in a dc with your own servers. check it out. it is still free and in testing phase. it has a plugin ecosystem which let's you write your own plugins to do whatever you want.</comment>


The iPhone 6S is the last of the great iPhones - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2017/09/11/iphone-6s-is-great-new-iphones-are-terrible/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link#FbXDxocl35qB <comment><USER2> > When removed from the mathy gibberish of "tech specs" meant to convince you > that you're getting something you should've had in the first > place—"processing power,"

Ummm what? CPUs are faster, ram is bigger, storage is bigger now than it was before. Because time passed. And this is as it should be. This is the way technology works.

I have an iphone 6s, and it's ok, I guess. The battery life is terrible (which the author completely neglects). Physical home button is, again, ok. Someone I know has an iphone 7, and the home button isn't...groundbreakingly different. If anything it's nicer since I don't have to take the time to fully press down on it. I used to have an iphone 5s, and it was way tough, like a tank. I dropped it all the time and it was fine.. My 6s is way more fragile.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think "great" implies that it is _clearly_ better than anything you'd compare it to. Messi is great at soccer. The McLaren F1 was a great car.

The iPhone 6s was merely a flagship phone that was directly comparable to other flagship phones- you didn't see people abandoning their flagship Androids for a 6s.

Compare the legacy of the 6s to the iPhone 3G, which has a much better claim to being great. There was no real competition for it. Even if you weren't an Apple fan, BlackBerry was clearly outclassed and dying, PalmPilots were already dead, and Android was just getting started.

</comment><comment><USER4> Where are the plus-sized variations? I have both 6S and 6S Plus and they hit the same spots too! And I loved the bigger screen of 6S Plus so I can consume more content. I've kept using it since then</comment>


Ask HN: Open Source Alternative to Stack Overflow? - <AUTHOR> We're looking for a place our partners can collaborate on questions/answers about our platform. We're thinking of going with Confluence Questions for now. I would love to have a higher quality portal along the lines of Stack Overflow. Something like Rocket.Chat on Meteor that deploys to Heroku. Perhaps something really nice that already exists on Meteor could be tailored for questions/answers. Any ideas? <comment><USER2> Have you considered Discourse? It isn't a true Q/A platform like Stack Overflow or Quora, but if you treat the initial post a question and the replies as answers it works. Also, this guy claims to have written a plugin that gives it Q/A functionality: [https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-discourse- suitable-for-use-f...](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-discourse-suitable-for- use-for-a-question-and-answer-type-page/17772/2)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know too much about it, but Question2Answer is an open source project that is basically what you're asking for. I don't think it fits the "really nice" part though.

[http://www.question2answer.org](http://www.question2answer.org)

</comment><comment><USER4> OSQA

\- [http://www.osqa.net](http://www.osqa.net)

\- [https://github.com/dzone/OSQA](https://github.com/dzone/OSQA)

</comment><comment><USER5> You could adapt Telescope to work for Q&A: [http://telescopeapp.org](http://telescopeapp.org)

</comment><comment><USER6> You can try Questions2Answer [http://www.question2answer.org/](http://www.question2answer.org/) [https://github.com/q2a/question2answer](https://github.com/q2a/question2answer)

</comment><comment><USER7> Askbot: [https://askbot.com/](https://askbot.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Why not Stack Overflow?

<comment><USER9> Because presumably it must be internally hosted as it will discuss commercial, proprietary software. Even if not, would we want to muddy Stack Overflow with the OP's customer support?

<comment><USER10> Using various StackExchange sites for product support is not all that unusual. A lot of them are rolled into others rather than StackOverflow, but AskUbuntu is one that stands alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Private Reddit Server?</comment>


Ask HN: Being part of a US based company as a foreigner - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I started an US based company together with a former colleague. He is an US citizen while i'm an European citizen. We have several contracts, with our main focus on US government work. I lived in the US for about 5 years but moved back to Europe, with no plans on moving back to the US for now. We are struggling with a few questions/things that probably the people at HN experienced as well and resolved due to the link with the "start-up" world.
Currently the US based company is registered completely under the name of the other partner within the business. We are trying to figure out a good structure where the company will still be 50% US owned but were we both get an even "share".
We need to keep the company 50% US owned to target certain US Government bids. Any ideas on possible solutions?
Certain bids also demand that persons working on the contract have a US VISA and/or US working permit. I, as an European citizen, would like to assist as well, so we have looked into either an E or L VISA, but both seems to have some issues and we haven't found a proper company that could assist/advise us with this. Is there anyway that I could assist on these type of projects as well?
I would be also interested to learn about companies within Massachusetts that could help us with both these questions. We contacted a few, but they didn't have the expertise we were looking for.
Any advise on this would be really appreciate!
Thank you! <comment><USER2> Any immigration attorney should be able to help you with this - it shouldn't matter if they're in Massachusetts or not. Just try to find one that has some experience of tech start ups. I've had a few conversations with [https://startupimmigrationattorney.com/](https://startupimmigrationattorney.com/) and I was pretty happy with them, although we didn't actually make any applications for anything.

I believe that with E visas, the company has to be mainly owned by citizens of the treaty country (not US, iow) so with the 50% ownership I'm not sure if that will work.

Are you sure that your bids require everyone to have US work authorization? For comparison, my organization has people working from Europe and people on US visas all working on the same contracts - only the people who live in or travel to the US need visas. And these are often public sector contracts. I've never heard anything about European based staff not being able to contribute.</comment>