Facebook published a long blog post today about their enforcement efforts around app advertising and offer scams. And while they didn’t mention all the negative press that has hit them this week, that’s the reason for the new communication.
Facebook says that deceptive ads are a widespread problem on the Web (which is true), and they say they’ve been fighting these scams for some time (which is also true, albeit a little slowly sometimes). They point to their updated policies on third party ads on the Facebook platform from July – which are aggresively pro-user but have rarely been enforced. They also note that they have disabled two ad networks since then, and are disabling two more now.
In my talks with Facebook earlier this week they took the position that they’ve been aggresively protecting users, and they’re taking the same tone in this blog post. They say that with so many ads and so many apps its impossible to monitor the entire platform effectively. My answer was that it took me about 10 seconds to find really scammy ads on FarmVille, the most popular social game on Facebook with 63+ million monthly users. If they just start with the big guys, a lot of the problem will go away.
In our original post we showed a financial connection between these ads and Facebook. Apps take the money from the ads and then aggressively buy ads on Facebook, effectively giving them a cut. So slow enforcement against even the top apps when they are so blatantly violating the rules is both unacceptable and suspicious.
Facebook says they are building out teams and technologies to address the problem.
We’ve witnessed a remarkable effort this week by industry players to clean up the ecosystem, even while Facebook has been silent on the issue. MySpace, Zynga and RockYou all took steps to eliminate scams.
Which is remarkable when you think about it. Anyone who doesn’t engage in scammy behavior right now is at a monetization disadvantage. There are real similarities between this issue and steroid use in baseball. As long as the MLB didn’t really enforce steroid use among players, it was a competitive necessity to take the drugs, and so many more players took them than otherwise would. What we saw this week was the equivalent of the MLB staying silent while a group of the most popular players admitted to steroid use and promised to stop using it from now on.
If Facebook is serious about stopping app offer scams, it will all be a lot easier in the future for developers to abstain. Hopefully, this is the start of a much cleaner Facebook.
But if they continue with their arguments that Facebook is no dirtier than the rest of the Internet, and resist outside pressure to clean up their community, we could quickly be back where we were just a week ago.
I was wondering why Facebook did not take any action. Well, Arrington is really on it. No wonder why he is listed as Time top 100 most influential figures on the Web.
i think He should be sanctified or something. the patron saint of internet advertising or sth. but i ‘ve better be careful because i wouldn’t want to feel His wrath
Can’t hold FB to too unrealistic a standard. Just like fighting spammers, fighting scammers is an ongoing and constant arms race and would appear that FB is going to take it seriously… that’s all you could ask from them and at their size, enforcement easier said than done.
Give him the nobel peace prize.
maybe He should be sanctified. the patron saint of internet advertising or sth. but i ‘ve better be careful, i wouldn’t want to feel His wrath.
facebook started enforcing their new ad guidelines starting october 30. We got an email about this from Anu Shukla herself (we use offerpal), as well as a confirmation that offerpal confirmed that facebook approves their offers
yeah, i’ve heard about that. After my original post on Oct. 26 – http://www.tech...-make-millions/ – I spoke to Facebook briefly about the larger stories I was going to run. Shortly after those conversations enforcement emails started to go out.
What’s clear is that the enforcement side of facebook and the sales side of facebook are very different teams. And it seems to me that the sales side tends to get what it wants until something bad happens, then FB comes down hard on enforcement.
“enforcement” probably actually reports to PR in the org chart.
also, if your comment is accurate, it’s really sad that FB approved their offers. most of the scams are completely gone now though at least.
this is facebook’s ad guidelines : http://www.face..._guidelines.php which they wanted enforced to the letter
look:
Dear Offerpal Facebook Developer,
As a follow up to the email we sent on Thursday Oct 29th, in which we informed you that we were auditing our entire offer mix to ensure compliance with Facebook’s principles and policies, we can now report that we are 100% compliant with the standards they have established.
We’ve worked closely with Facebook since last week’s announcement that they would begin cracking down more stringently on non-conforming advertisements, and as of today, November 3rd, they have told us that every one of our offers abides by their policies.
This means that you are completely protected from any type of punitive action and can rest assured that only high-quality, policy-conforming offers are running in your application.
This means that you are completely protected from any type of punitive action
Well, other than civil suits from users, and maybe a pesky interstate commerce charge or two.
maybe you should also include adsense in your targets list. right now 2 of the adsense ads on techcrunch are celldorado sms subscription ads
That is why I only post what I don’t mind sharing with the world. I knew that going into it.
These types of deceiving ads / offers are creating a bad name for the offers marketing business just like spam emails unfortunately labeled all email marketing as spam. I’m not buying they can’t catch them all though, they just choose not to (per the reason you noted). It would actually be quite easy. Give users the option to flag / report offers as a potential scam and those get tracked in a reporting system internal folks use to investigate. Rather than hunting through all the apps they can simply “farm” the alerts flagged by the community. They should get the farming thing
Here is a scammy ad running on Facebook Flyers this very second:
Ad Copy:
Where is Your Girlfriend? Find out her exact location now.
Landing Page:
http://themobil...988&ref=azn
This is pretty much the same stuff as the scammy offers — deceptive ads, $9.99/month mobile subscription. Direct compensation of Facebook for running scammy offers.
Facebook should therefore ban Facebook.
Facebook won’t do anything serious because the guys (unfortunately) know that they need all the stupid games, etc.
> Facebook says they are building out teams and
> technologies to address the problem.
Ha, after a year? LOL. Absurd. Facebook was really great back .. 2… 3 years ago. Now, it reminds me more and more of MySpace.
So sad.
I know that a lot of my friends have been getting hacked and then i receive a bunch of spam stuff. It to bad people do that .
I travelled to the Facebook Conference in 2008 from Australia – very excited about the platform and opportunity after spending $30k of development into our App (now defunct) expecting Facebook to announce ways to assist developers to monetize their Apps i.e. PAY THE BILLS and also to combat the Zombie Eating apps which were widespread at the time.
If they allowed developers to:
1) Have access to Facebook’s Billing Platform i.e. iTunes
2) Receive a share of the Ad-Revenue on pages with Apps.
We would not have as many of these problems, I know a lot of app developers who have left the Platform all with great idaes at the time.
At F8 they even announced they’d be promoting good apps that do the right thing, not sure I’ve seen this, still we’ve moved on and investing our time and money elsewhere. I still use Facebook Daily and have to block apps sadly promoted by my friends who still believe that if they forward an email to 10 friends Intel will buy them a laptop or Microsoft won’t shut the Internet down.
Anyway perhaps if they weren’t so interested in eating pizza, drinking redbull and playing guitar hero there may have been a chance…
No offence meant to anyone who eats pizza, drinks redbull or plays guitar hero.
@chriskettle
Are you going to start taking Google to task over the deceptive ads they serve via Adsense? Your interest in “clean” advertising is noble, your inconsistency is rediculous.
this is also facebook’s argument. the difference is the baiting going on with social games by offering currency in exchange for the scams. like the old free ipod days, although that model was based on breakage (people abandoning the effort after hundreds of pages of lead gen forms).
@arrington
Actually, the mobile offers are also based on a breakage model. Right now, it’s a very competitive market. Advertisers who buy acquisitions on a CPA basis pay out an average of 3 months revenue up front. Some consumers will cancel immediately, and others will stay on for much longer. The advertising buyer only profits if enough users stay on for a very long time.
I’m surprised that you haven’t focused on the mobile carriers. They take 40-60% of revenue per user, per sale. This obviously drives up the rates that all mobile subscription services have to charge — and ultimately affects the end-consumer.
Also, these offers have been running for years on MySpace outside of its app platform (I wonder if MySpace has changed its policies for its general ad inventory or just its app platform).
OfferPal is an easy target but there are lots of fish to fry. You might want to look at Mobile Messenger (which powers offers from almost every ad network out there). Media Breakaway is also a huge player.
no, breakage as in people didn’t complete the ipod stuff and so never actually got it. so, no cost.
FB has not been ‘fighting’ scammy ads at all – they review EVERY ad manually including its landing page, so they could easily have blocked them. They couldn’t bare saying no to the revenue.
A couple things (imo) in this article that are really good to point out:
“In our original post we showed a financial connection between these ads and Facebook. Apps take the money from the ads and then aggressively buy ads on Facebook, effectively giving them a cut. So slow enforcement against even the top apps when they are so blatantly violating the rules is both unacceptable and suspicious.”
and
“Anyone who doesn’t engage in scammy behavior right now is at a monetization disadvantage. There are real similarities between this issue and steroid use in baseball.”
This has been going on for years across the internet and am glad it is being pointed out, but am saddened that is has had to take this long. imo, this is one of the major reasons MySpace, GeoCities, et-al, have lost their audiences – loss of trust due to a “show us the money now” mentality.
On the other hand, I do understand that these sites need to turn a profit, however, if they go into their endeavors knowing beforehand that it will be a long-term investment, I do not think this would become an issue in the first place. And, so far, this is one of the things that has REALLY impressed me about Facebook is that they really do seem to be trying to keep a clean environment — at least compared to their contemporaries. And I have to give kudos to Mark Z., as (from an outsiders perspective), it seems that his long-term vision (granted, not always so hot: “Beacon”), not selling out after several offers, and pushing back on external pressures, has paid dividends.
Facebook is de-facto, and I hear no undertones of people leaving, or tiring of it as though it were going downhill.
The fourth branch of government doing its work.
you don’t actually believe them do you?
These guys are playing the PR game — saying anything to get everyone to think it’s over. It’s not. These offers will keep coming. And big app companies will keep lining their pockets and those of Facebook with this cash.
Social networks are not monetizable without this junk. I don’t know why it’s not obvious.
arrington, since u seem to have really disrupted a profitable niche, i am wondering if u are getting any threats?
well, sorta. Facebook continues to not give me facebook.com/mike. Is that a threat?
mike, seriously great reporting. the number of people you are literally saving from these unethical scams is probably in the hundreds, if not thousands. for all the shit you get sometimes, i hope you are giving yourself the proverbial pat on the back.
facebook should be ashamed of themselves for not stepping up to tackle this and ultimately let a reporter/blogger force them into it. first the anti-semitism stuff and now this. if this is the ethics and tactics needed to be successful like facebook, they can have at it. i’d rather be unemployed.
Mike, amazing, you make a statement at a conference, after a 10 second experience you have on farmville (maybe not literally 10 seconds), and people are making changes that will impact some serious revenue. A 1/3 of Zynga’s!!! Which is estimated to be around $100 million. Altogether, considering how much these companies advertise on FB, other games with similar scams, and other sites like MySpace, that number is a lot higher. Has that hit you yet? Millions of people scammed, who knows how many people’s complaints fell on deaf ears, and no one speaks a word about it. You find out, ask a question, and write an article…and, change. That is some real journalistic power.
I am the new CEO of Offerpal (as of yesterday) and although I’ve only got 48 hours under my belt, and have entered this industry in the midst of a recent firestorm of controversy, I thought it was time to share some of my thoughts and plans.
Direct marketing, in particular lead-gen, has always been full of questionable, misleading, and outright fraudulent marketers and offers. We all get these daily via snail mail, email, phone, and late-night TV. Unfortunately, this is the nature of the Direct Marketing beast.
Although a distribution channel which carries or distributes such offers does not actually create the offers, I do believe that a channel that wishes to be perceived as credible and of high integrity does indeed have a responsibility to make sure that the offers it distributes are not deceptive or “scammy”.
Over the last year, the use of offer-based payment systems such as Offerpal has skyrocketed, and it’s pretty clear today that the industry has not kept up with its explosive growth in terms of properly policing the offers that are being distributed.
I am not going to comment on events leading up to this situation, nor on other players in the industry, but I have quickly concluded that regrettably, Offerpal has been guilty of distributing offers of questionable integrity from some of our many advertisers.
The policies we’ve had up until now have not been thorough enough to prevent such offers from airing, nor has our organization had the proper focus and accountability to ensure quality assurance over the offers we distribute.
As a result, we’ve had a number of offers which were recently taken down by either ourselves or our partners. Although we believe that the majority of our offers were valid and not misleading in any way, we have acted conservatively by taking down the majority of our offers and we are now in the process of letting them back into the system after inspection.
However, we’ve also made some erroneous communications to partners and developers about the state of our compliance. In particular, we recently sent a letter to our Facebook developers which assured them that we were completely in compliance with Facebook standards, when in fact we were not. This was not a deliberate tactic of any kind, it was a mistake that reflected our ineffective checks and controls. But nevertheless, it was an inaccurate claim and for that we take full responsibility, and I apologize to Facebook and to their user community.
The good news in all this is that it has brought to light some very important issues for our collective industry which need to be addressed immediately. For our part, we will be doing the following:
1. It will be a fundamental part of the Offerpal culture that any offers we distribute meet stringent standards of integrity and quality, as specified by our partners, credible industry experts, and good old common sense.
2. We will individually inspect and approve every single individual offer before it is allowed to go into distribution on our system.
3. We will customize our offer profiles to meet the needs and standards of each partner and will not attempt to have a “one size fits all” approach.
4. We will do everything we can within reason to lead the industry and set the example in these efforts.
Over the coming weeks you will hear much more from us on this issue, but more importantly you will see action and results. I will remain personally involved in this initiative and consider it one of my highest priorities in assuming my new role here.
wow. solid.
yes but the blood money has already been MADE. we can’t just let bygones be bygones. this is how the industry of scammy offers works – run them for as long as you can and then when the shit hits the fan, you run with what you have. offerpal folks are probably sitting in conference rooms saying “well, it was good while it lasted!”
know that facebook is just as guilty on this account.
very impressive
is MA a current/future investor in offerpal?
Four points in writing. Let’s see how this turns out.
Wow.
It is not often that an industry voluntarily addresses a major problem that is also the source of a large share of its profits.
Very impressive if they follow through.
It is obvious that Facebook lacks the will power to enforce its own guidelines; and it may be deliberate. How is it that after so much of time, they have been able to act only in two cases, when the number of such scams must be quite large? Isn’t it a case of “you scratch my back and I scratch your back”?
facebook is guilty guilty guilty. it DOES take 10 seconds to locate the scammy offers and a team does NOT need to be built to do this. if anything, it’s a ploy to buy more time (to see what *else* will happen or if things die down).
There appears to be one party involved in these ’scams’ that have not been mentioned.
The companies involved in supplying and billing for the ’services’ on social networks are supposed to be subject to the regulatory laws of the country where the ‘customer’ is.
In the UK the Regulator (PhonepayPlus) Fines and sometimes bars non-compliant companies.
Here are just two extracts from adjudications that took place this year.
28 May 2009
Information provider…………………2waytraffic Mobile Group BV
Service provider……………………..mBlox Limited
Fine £40000
Between January and May 2009, the PhonepayPlus Executive (the ‘Executive’) received 142 complaints regarding services operating on shortcode 85015, 102 complaints regarding services operating on shortcode 85115 and 38 complaints regarding services operating on shortcode 64848. These complaints related to competition services which were subscription-based. The Executive monitored two services operating on shortcode 85015 (the service called ‘Celebrity Oscar Quiz 2009’ and ‘Your Love Revealed’) and the service called ‘IQ Quiz’ operating on shortcode 64848. The Executive located all three promotions through the ‘Applications’ section on the social networking website Facebook.
11 June 2009
Information provider…………………….Diginetwork Inc
Service provider…………………………mBlox Limited
Fine £90000
The Information Provider stated that it had contracted with ‘many top tier Affiliate Networks’ to provide advertising for the purpose of prompting consumers to enter its service. The advertising which was brought to the attention of the Executive via public complaints was the Facebook promotion. Complainants informed the PhonepayPlus Executive (the ‘Executive) that the promotion had misled them into accessing the ‘IQ Quiz’ and entering the subscription-based service.
bulshit !!
facebook has no enforcement whatsoever and if anyone eat the shit they/you are feeding them he is just as dumb.
facebook doesn’t care. in 3 months i exposed more then 300 scammers and alone with my group.
nobody gives a shit !