Peter Thiel at Center of Facebook’s Internal Divisions on Politics

Re:Peter Thiel at Center of Facebook’s Internal Divisions on... by WorldMaker on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @03:29PM (#21818426)

The very nature that Facebook sold micro-targeted ads for pennies just because they were "only" for the smallest audiences, but yet these audiences were most likely to reshare the content virally, effectively whitewashing the "sponsored content" tag off it into a larger population of feeds, effectively created a scenario where ad spend on Facebook at the time must have been absolutely misleading.

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Re:Peter Thiel at Center of Facebook’s Internal Divisions on... by ameister14 on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @03:48PM (#21818648)

None of that is the case. Microtargeting isn't cost effective and doesn't scale well, and it's usually more expensive, not less.

In 2013, I remember people were building Facebook audiences by ripping Facebook ID's from relevant open groups - that was insanely targeted audience, and while it wasn't general practice, it's definitely something advertisers were using. None of what comes from that is unexpected results. Your argument appears to be that Russian authorities with a $100k budget were 1000x better at manipulating Facebook's audience targeting tools than the people that had been paid to do just that for years - is that true?

I do not like Facebook, personally, and I don't like Trump. But this appears an unlikely scenario.

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Re:Peter Thiel at Center of Facebook’s Internal Divisions on... by edmundsauto on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @03:46PM (#21818625)

I'm not sure what you mean -- generally, the smaller the audience size, the higher the CPM.

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Re:Peter Thiel at Center of Facebook’s Internal Divisions on... by dhimes on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @08:29AM (#21824564)

He is saying that if an 'ad' hits the right person in the right way, that person will share it withing a large group. So you may pay more to reach the first, but after that the target audience does the work for you by sharing.

-> I sponsor an ad targeting a certain audience

-> Byron Shifflett comments on the sponsored content in a way that makes it clear I reached him

-> Under another account, I reply to his comment

-> I send a friend request

-> He accepts

-> Now I can reach him just by posting my nonsense on my second account

-> He shares. That's what I like about him.

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