Agree. And I guess they have reason to be happy for now.
> The shareholders of companies spending ad money do not care about metrics, they care about revenue.
Agree. And they have reason to be sceptical: a lot of Facebooks growth in ad sales seems to have come from companies who suddenly had to pay to reach their fan base.
> People who buy those ads care about metrics, but while they cannot see inside the FB machine and need to trust them somewhat regarding views and reach they have absolute visibility on the results of that ad spend and where those visitors are coming from.
Another explanation: pay per view ads are massively overvalued but for some reason or another management isn't aware of it or doesn't care yet.
Also there are companies that will track your FB ads and tell you if FB is lying.
People like ads.
You know "brand Twitter" and how people like talking about the cheeky thing that Burger King said? That's an ad.
The Super Bowl? People watch for the ads.
Magazines: people collect pretty ad series, like the old Absolute Vodka ones.
Podcasts? We all loved saying "mail kimp" like idiots for a couple months because of a popular ad.
People like ads! …Except on the web.
No one has ever liked a banner ad. Search ads people sometimes like, but no one has ever liked a banner ad. So, they kept adding more banner ads to try to make it up in volume and then they added a shit ton of tracking because they could, but guess what, banner ads still suck and no one likes them.
So, maybe stop trying to make fetch happen? If banner ads haven't been successful for 20 years, maybe they aren't going to suddenly become successful and it's time to stop trying.