From an advertiser's point of view, those fake profiles are still real humans, right? So your ad is still being seen, and those Facebook profiles probably share enough of the social graph with a real Facebook profile that you can still do demographic targeting, no?
From an ad network's point of view, maybe, but from a publisher's point of view, no. This is just another variation on click fraud, because fake people don't buy real goods.
If you actually read the article, the Heineken advertiser's response is:
> “It was like we’d been throwing our money to the mob,” Amram says. “As an advertiser we were paying for eyeballs and thought that we were buying views. But in the digital world, you’re just paying for the ad to be served, and there’s no guarantee who will see it, or whether a human will see it at all.”
That's a response to bots viewing ads, not people who register a second Facebook account so they can send themselves Farmville gifts. They aren't fake people, they're real people wearing fake mustaches. I am sure they are less valuable to advertisers than Facebook profiles with real demographic data but it's still better than an ad never seen by a human.
But the GP is talking about a case where the ads are being viewed (so there is a guarantee that a human sees it); just not by as many unique people as the number of accounts would suggest.
Not necessarily. I'm not in the SEO or advertising game but intuition tells me that having the same person see an ad twice is less valuable than 2 people seeing the ad. Additionally, as a result "fake" accounts are likely to contain less information advertise to "target" so they're only hitting fake accounts with overly broad appeal and not really creating content that might interest the user on his/her fake profile.
From the post that I was replying to, posted by the person you're replying to:
> Indeed. I was working for a Facebook gaming company around 2010. Through the "recruit a friend" bonuses and "have X friends click this" mechanics, there were incentives to simply make fake accounts to obtain the goals. We looked at our users and figured about half were fake Facebook accounts. I have to imagine the numbers for other companies, like Zynga, were similar, as they used the same mechanics.
If I have 100 fake accounts, how many of them have access to my wallet to buy what you're selling in the ad? If 100 of them click your ad, how should you count it "100 potential customers" or 1.
Most of the fakes seem to represent a 0% chance of making a sale.
