Have you heard of Virtual Bagel? Their Facebook
page has over 4,000 likes. They use the page to promote their brilliant
business model 'we send you bagels via the Internet -- just download and enjoy.' It sounds like a joke, and it is, sort of.
This page was set up by BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones in 2012. He wanted to find out what is the worth of
a like on a Facebook page, so he bought some likes for Virtual Bagel. Now there are two
ways to buy 'likes', the legitimate way and the illegitimate way. The illegitimate way is to go to a website
like BoostLikes.com purchase some likes. You can get 1000 for $70. Sites like these use clickfarms in developing
countries like India, the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Indonesia and Bangladesh. Here employees are routinely paid just 1 dollar
per thousand clicks of the like button. So Facebook explicitly forbids buying likes
this way. Instead they offer the 'legitimate' way to
pay for likes by advertising your page. Prominently displayed is a link to "Get more likes" with
the promise: "Connect with more of the people who matter to you." And this is how Virtual Bagel got its 4000
likes. Rory Cellan-Jones paid 100 dollars to Facebook and the likes rolled in. He targeted
his ad to the UK and the United States, but also to countries like Egypt, Indonesia and
the Philippines. Now where do you think Virtual Bagel was most popular? I'll give you a hint,
it wasn't the US or the UK. But within a day he had over 1600 likes mostly from developing
countries. Now what was more problematic was the people
who followed Virtual Bagel looked suspicious. For example there was one Cairo-based follower
whose name was Ahmed Ronaldo. His profile consisted almost exclusively of
pictures of Cristiano Ronaldo and he liked 3,000 pages. Cellan-Jones also observed that his new throng
of fans was particularly disengaged, just as you'd imagine those from a click-farm would
be. But he hadn't hired a click-farm, he had paid for Facebook ads. This story was reported in July 2012. In August,
Facebook reported it had identified and deleted 83 million fake accounts (that was 9% of the
total at the time). This resulted in noticeable drops for popular singers and celebrities. So did they delete all of the fake likes?
Nope, not even close. I know because most of the likes on my Facebook page are not genuine. In May 2012, I received a number of emails
from Facebook offering me $50 worth of free promotion of my page, which at the time had
only 2,000 likes. My YouTube channel had twenty times that following
so I thought surely this free 'paid' promotion could help me reach more of the people who
mattered to me. And immediately I could see results. Within just a few days my likes had
tripled, and they kept on growing, thousands per day. And after a few months I had about 70,000
Facebook likes, which matched my YouTube subscribers at the time. Now what was weird was my posts
on Facebook didn't seem to be getting any more engagement than when I had 2,000. If
anything, they were getting less engagement. I didn't understand why at the time, but I
have since realized it's because most of those likes I was gaining through Facebook ads were
not from people who were genuinely interested in Veritasium. How do I know? Well because
fake likes behave very differently from real followers. Have a look at this graph of the engagement
of my Facebook followers. Here I'm plotting countries as bubbles, so this is Canada and
the size represents the number of likes I've received from that country. So this is the
United States, it's a nice big bubble. Now I'm ranking these countries on the horizontal
axis based on what percentage of those likes have engaged with my page this month. So as
you can see roughly 30% Canadians and Americans have engaged with my page, but they're not
as active as the Germans where over 40% of my likes have engaged, and they are not as
active as the Austrians a small but passionate group of Veritasium fans at nearly 60% These are all of the other Western countries.
So you can see that it's common for between 25% and 35% of my page likes to engage with
my page every month. Now here is Egypt, where less than 1% of my
likes have engaged with my page. Now this is India, the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Indonesia, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. That's a big followings, but no engagement.
Together all of these countries make up 80,000 likes, that's roughly 75% of the total likes
I had before the last video. And these are the profiles that followed me when I used
Facebook advertising. And they are worse than useless. Here's why: When you make a post, Facebook distributes
it to a small fraction of the people who like your page just to gauge their reaction.
If they engage with it by liking, commenting, and sharing then Facebook distributes the
post to more of your likes and even their friends.
Now if you somehow accumulate fake likes, Facebook's initial distribution goes out to
fewer real fans, and therefore it receives less engagement, and so consequently you reach
a smaller number of people. That's how a rising number of fans can result in a drop in engagement. And from this Facebook makes money twice over
-- once to help you acquire new fans, and then again when you try to reach them. I mean
your organic reach may be so restricted by the lack of engagement, that your only option
is to pay to promote the post. What's worse, there is no way to delete fake
likes in bulk -- all you can do is target posts around them. And I should re-iterate I never bought fake
likes. I used Facebook's legitimate advertising, but the results are as if I had paid for fake
likes from a clickfarm. Now you might think the solution to all this
is just to exclude countries with click-farms from your ad campaigns. But unfortunately
the problem goes much deeper. Meet Virtual Cat, a virtual pet like none
other. Its page is committed to supplying only the
worst, most annoying drivel you can imagine. Only an idiot would like this page. And that's
not just my opinion, that's actually what it says in the page description. And I should know because I wrote it. I created
this page yesterday and I then paid $10 to advertise the page through Facebook targeted
only to cat-lovers in the United States, Canada, Australia and the UK. Now I expected that
because I had excluded all of the big click-farm countries and because the page is so terrible
that I basically wouldn't get any likes. But within 20 minutes I had blown through my whole
budget and I got 39 likes. So who are these people liking a blank page and costing me
25 cents a piece? All of the profiles were all from the places
I had targeted, mostly the US, but there was something strange about them. All of these
people liked a LOT of things, like hundreds and thousands things. And a lot of the things they liked were odd
too. Like in one account this person liked T-mobile, AT&T and Verizon. They liked Jeep
and Lexus and Mercedes and Volvo and Volkswagon. They like everything. Other accounts I saw,
they liked kitchen scrubbers and they liked mouthwash. Who reports that on their Facebook
page? It just baffles me. So the real mystery to me is why someone,
somewhere would click on ads they didn't care about without making money from them. I mean
I don't think these likes came from bots - they are too easy to identify and eliminate. And
I also don't think for a second Facebook would pay click-farms to click on those ads to generate
revenue for them, so it really seems like a mystery. And then, in this article I found what I think
is the most reasonable hypothesis. Click-farms click the ads for free. In order
to avoid detection by Facebook's fraud algorithms, they like pages other than the ones they've
been paid for to seem more genuine. I mean you can imagine 1000 likes on a particular
page coming from one geographic area in a short period of time would seem suspicious.
But buried in a torrent of other 'like' activity? They would be impossible to identify. So workers at these click-farms will literally
click anything. I mean where do you think Facebook's Security page is most popular?
Dhaka, Bangladesh. What about Google? Dhaka. What about soccer star David Beckham? It's
actually Cairo, but you take my point. So wherever you're targeting, advertising
your page on Facebook is a waste of money. I wish Facebook would remove the fake likes
from my page and all the others. But that would mean admitting that they have generated
significant ad revenue from clicks that weren't genuine, which then suppressed the reach of
pages who had low engagement, forcing those pages to pay again to reach inauthentic fans.
So the truth is Facebook benefits by maintaining this status quo because the reality is nobody
likes this many things.
Never will I pay Facebook for ads. Thank you very much for this post!
From my own personal experience this is 100% accurate and, as the host of the video pointed out, has had a negative impact on all of our engagements.
The biggest kick in the pants was that we paid Facebook $100 to promote our GOTY podcast video, a post that was viewed by several THOUSAND people, and only 10 people clicked through to the video. A <.002% return on investment and the last money we'll ever give to Facebook.
Edit: Fixed symbol (thanks /u/godrim) and added link to post (by request)
TIL We Austrians are passionate fans ;)
Wow, I work with facebook a lot in my job and this explains a lot. This video was great and for sure changed how I'll use facebook.
As a foreigner, thank you for the clear pronounciation and simple explanation. Longer topics like these are difficult to follow.. thanks!
I just did a Facebook ad campaign for work. We are a very regional/local based business, and the likes I was seeing were usually from people who aren't in our immediate area, have never called, or come in. Why would someone just like a random business that they've never done business with? Also, looking at their profiles, there was always other randomly Liked businesses that didn't make any sense. Someone from MA liking small restaurants from TX, or contractors from FL.
EDIT: I definitely did close in the targeted range to nearby towns that could possibly be relevant to our business. Almost ALL of the likes were from the outer distance, which is closest to a major city. In all honesty, none of the people who liked the page seem to be real. Haven't heard from any of them before, or since.
This is pretty scummy. The only difference between illegal and legal likes seems to be Facebook get a cut. Then they get more money by forcing you to promote. What incentive does it have to crack down on bot farms beyond the basic PR "made an effort" requirements.
Fake-upvoted
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