Facebook Ads work. They work when you put effort into them and know what exactly what you're doing. Ask any marketing firm. It's a complicated mechanism that has to be learned and experimented with but now Facebook Ads are among the lions share of the advertising market along with Google. They work for many businesses. Just ask Dollar Shave Club. Ask Stitch Fix. Ask Warby Parker. Ask King.
Facebook Ads also don't work if all you're doing is throwing $10k into them with a bunch of random targeting. In fact, no advertising works if you don't know what you're doing and if you're not tracking everything to a T. That's not Facebook's fault - their engine is completely self-serve. As are AdWords from Google. You can blow $100k on AdWords and get no results just as easily as you can blow it on Facebook and get no results.
I made no value judgement on their innovations. I've learned better than to do that on HN where people become so hostile if you even suggest that Facebook might be useful in some ways. I only made a value judgement on their business which is sound and growing rapidly.
Furthermore, in many third world countries, the only internet they know and will ever see is facebook properties via internet.org.
I see the facebook logo on almost all retailers in my patch of the world. Retailers no longer advertise their websites or phone numbers. See us on facebook, they all say. This doesnt just happen without a lot of people brilliantly working hard and smart.
Facebook the user experience has - objectively and measurably (even almost by definition) - taken a severe nose dive since attempting to capitalize on the page views. They’ve spent their time evolving into an advertising behemoth that has upended the advertising market, but very poorly despite all the access they have to metrics and use identifiable data because the user’s best interests and the advertiser’s best interest are almost at polar cross purposes such that it isn’t possible to optimize for one except at the cost of the other.
Facebook ads simply do not convert except to Facebook properties (with the obvious “exceptions that prove the rule” aside); they are measurably worse investments than CPC advertising, probably worse than traditional CPM adverts (fake clicks), and probably better than old-school mass media advertising (billboards, bus stations, tv ads). They make their buck on people that either invest xxx thousand dollars until it becomes measurably obvious to the them or that don’t be know enough to measure.
Facebooks only “social” innovations that are actually forward-looking past the heyday of feeds and in-feed apps (FarmVille and co) for consumers are Instagram and WhatsApp, both of which were bought out when facebook’s own in-house attempts failed to compete.