This Man's $600,000 Facebook Disaster Is A Warning For All Small Businesses -

This Man's $600,000 Facebook Disaster Is A Warning For All Small Businesses - 



It continues to amaze me how people are completely ignoring what appears to be an incredible amount of shadiness inherent in Facebook’s business model. Whether or not this is intentional click fraud, it is clear that advertisers are not getting what they think they are getting. They won’t be fooled forever, and once they wake up to the money being wasted on fake “likes” and “clicks,” I’m curious to see what happens to their revenue.

The following article from SF Gate is a perfect followup to my post from a couple weeks ago: How Much of Facebook’s Ad Revenue is From Click Fraud?

Perhaps the most shocking passage from the entire article is the following:

Naturally, Brar began disputing his bill with Facebook. He wanted his clicks audited by a third party, to see how many were genuine. Then he discovered that Facebook’s terms of service forbid third-party verification of its clicks. That’s something all advertisers should be aware of before they spend a penny on Facebook.

Facebook is different from the rest of the online ad industry, which follows a standard of allowing click audits by third parties like the IAB, the Media Ratings Council or Ernst & Young.
Um, ok then…

Now more from the SF Gate:

Raaj Kapur Brar runs a small but successful empire of online fashion magazines from his base just outside Toronto. Some of his titles are huge online brands, such as Fashion & Style Magazine, which has 1.6 million Facebook fans.

That’s more fans than Elle magazine has.

Recently, however, Brar has fallen out of love with Facebook. He discovered  that his Facebook fanbase was becoming polluted with thousands of fake likes from bogus accounts. He can no longer tell the difference between his real fans and the fake ones. Many appear fake because the users have so few friends, are based in developing countries, or have generic profile pictures.
At one point, he had a budget of more than $600,000 for Facebook ad campaigns, he tells us. Now he believes those ads were a waste of time.
Facebook declined multiple requests for comment on this story.

Brar’s take is a cautionary one because Facebook has 25 million small businesses using its platform for one marketing purpose or another. Many of them are not sophisticated advertisers — they are simply plugging a credit card number into the system and hoping for the best. This is what can happen if you don’t pay careful attention to contract language, or the live, real-time results your campaigns on Facebook are having.

Here’s how Brar believes it went down: He became interested in advertising on Facebook in 2012, and he took it seriously. He went to Facebook’s local Toronto office where he was trained to use the advertising interface. They set up the campaign, and ran a small “beta” test. Then, in late October Brar pulled the trigger on a massive push through Facebook’s Ads Manager. He used Bitly and Google Analytics to measure the number of clicks his campaign was generating.

The results were disastrous, Brar says.

Facebook’s analytics said the campaign sent him five times the number of clicks he was seeing arrive on his sites, which Brar was monitoring with Bitly, Google Analytics, and his own web site’s WordPress dashboard. There was a reasonable discrepancy between the Bitly and Google numbers, Brar says, but not the five-fold margin between Google’s and Facebook’s click counts.

At one point, data from Facebook indicated his ads had delivered 606,000 clicks, but the site itself registered only 160,000 incoming clicks from Facebook, according to data supplied by Brar. (160,000 clicks is a not insignificant return. After all, these are not clicks on a mere Facebook page, these are users who clicked through to an off-Facebook site.)

“I don’t know what to say, right? This is a huge loss. This ran for four days, then we just stopped the campaign,” Brar says.

Then, things got worse. Even though Fetopolis wasn’t advertising, the likes and new followers kept on piling up. Normally, an advertiser would be pleased at such a result, but every time Brar checked a sample of the new fans he found people with dubious names; a picture of a flower as a profile shot; and fewer than 10 friends — classic signs of a fake profile.

Naturally, Brar began disputing his bill with Facebook. He wanted his clicks audited by a third party, to see how many were genuine. Then he discovered that Facebook’s terms of service forbid third-party verification of its clicks. That’s something all advertisers should be aware of before they spend a penny on Facebook: Facebook has operated this way for a long time, and has a page for advertisers explaining in more depth why third-party click reporting may not match Facebook’s click counts. Essentially, Facebook suggests, if clicks are not measured in exactly the same way over the same time intervals then there will always be discrepancies.

Facebook is different from the rest of the online ad industry, which follows a standard of allowing click audits by third parties like the IAB, the Media Ratings Council or Ernst & Young.
This will all be exposed by the market sooner or later. I’m just shocked it is taking so long for people to put two and two together.

Read more - 
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/This-Man-s-600-000-Facebook-Disaster-Is-A-5258472.php?t=7c5e3ab580

Selfies Spread Lice, Expert Claims -

Selfies Spread Lice, Expert Claims - 



Think twice before you get up close and personal for a selfie -- because that head-rubbing contact could allow lice to jump into your hair.

“I’ve seen a huge increase of lice in teens this year. Typically it’s younger children I treat, because they’re at higher risk for head-to-head contact. But now, teens are sticking their heads together every day to take cell phone pics,” Marcy McQuillan of Nitless Noggins, a lice removal service, told SFist.

Vanessa Mor of Oakland's Lice Control told CNET she's also seen an uptick in lice in teens and young adults. She didn't blame selfies, but didn't dismiss the idea either.

"That makes a lot of sense. In order to get it, you have to be direct contact -- sitting on the same towel, sharing headphones together or using someone else's hair curler, sharing hats, sweaters and scarves," Mor was quoted as saying.

But not everyone is buying the claim. In fact, one expert says this is a clear sign of someone selling something.

“Wherever these louse salons open a new branch, there always seems to be an epidemic. It’s good for business," Dr. Richard J. Pollack of the Harvard School of Public Health told NBC News.

Pollack, who also runs the pest identification and guidance service IdentifyUS, said he's seen no evidence that lice is spreading among selfie-snapping teens, or any other set of teens for that matter. Teens almost never have lice, he said.

In any case, the CDC has some tips for lice prevention -- and first on the list is to "avoid head-to-head (hair-to-hair) contact during play and other activities at home, school and elsewhere (sports activities, playground, slumber parties, camp)."

So maybe you should skip the selfies... just to be safe.

Read more - 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/25/selfies-spread-lice_n_4851657.html

How A Big Drug Company Inadvertently Got Americans Hooked On Heroin -

How A Big Drug Company Inadvertently Got Americans Hooked On Heroin - 



When she was 18, Arielle would come home every day and embark on what she calls an “Easter egg hunt." She wasn’t looking for candy. Arielle was hunting behind stairwells and inside closets in her suburban Long Island home for the OxyContin bottles her cousin brought home from work at a pharmacy and was hiding from her mother around the house.

“I found them one day, and I wanted to try them because all of my friends were already hooked,” said Arielle, who asked that her last name be withheld to avoid hurting her chances of getting a job. “I would see [my cousin] nodding out on the couch and not really being present, and that was how I wanted to feel. My best friend had just passed away, so I was numbing out the feelings.”

It took about a year before Arielle moved from prescription painkillers into the illegal drug that killed her best friend: heroin. She snorted it for the first time after tagging along with a friend who was going to buy some. "I was like, 'I love it,'" she said. Heroin was cheaper than prescription pills -- about $10 a bag, compared to $60 to $80 per pill -- and gave her a more potent high.

Her friend helped her inject the drug. “It was a feeling that I don’t think anyone should experience. Because once you experience it, you want to experience it over and over again,” she said. “ Next thing I know, I’m addicted.”

Arielle landed in a Long Island jail last year after she was caught breaking into a house and stealing money to buy drugs. Now 26 and living at a substance abuse treatment center, she says she's all too aware that her story isn’t unique.

Between 1996 and 2011, the number of people who ended up in substance abuse treatment centers in Suffolk County, where Arielle lives, as a result of heroin jumped 425 percent, according to a 2012 special grand jury report from the county’s Supreme Court. During the same period, the number of people who landed in substance abuse treatment for opioid pill use spiked 1,136 percent, the report found.

Long Island is one of many areas of the country where heroin addiction is reaching harrowing levels, according to Gregory Bunt, the medical director at Daytop Village, a New York-based substance abuse treatment center. The crisis is getting renewed attention after actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman died last month from an apparent heroin overdose. The rise in heroin use mirrors a decade-long spike in abuse of prescription opioids -- painkillers that are a medical cousin to heroin, but are legal as long as they’re prescribed by a doctor.

In recent years, more prescription drug abusers have started turning to heroin for a cheaper high as the price of pills skyrockets on the black market, Bunt said. Two factors have contributed to the cost increase: opioid addiction boosting demand and doctors becoming more cautious about prescribing opioids, decreasing supply, Bunt said.

Another reason for the price increase: The Drug War, according to a January 2012 report from Radley Balko. Government crackdowns have made it difficult for even reputable doctors to prescribe pain pills. To fill the void, doctors and others looking to make a buck off the prescription pills created so-called "pill mills" -- offices that prescribe pain medication in high volume and often serve people addicted to the drugs.

The result: Nearly four out of five people who recently started using heroin used prescription painkillers first, according to a 2013 study from the Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality.

“A lot of people who got in trouble with the prescription opiates are switching over to heroin, and they get more for their buck, so to speak,” Bunt said. In his experience, he added, much of the heroin available today is laced with other additives, like additional painkillers -- making it more dangerous.

“Once you inject the heroin that’s available today, you’re at very high risk for fatal overdose,” he said.



Read more - 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/24/heroin-epidemic_n_4790898.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

Packs of Chihuahuas are terrorizing an Arizona neighborhood, running through the streets and chasing kids -

Packs of Chihuahuas are terrorizing an Arizona neighborhood, running through the streets and chasing kids - 



Stray Chihuahuas are going wild in Maryvale, a neighborhood in Phoenix, Fox's KSAZ reported. The dogs are traveling in groups of 10 to 15.

"It makes it hard for the kids because they get chased down all the time when they're riding their little bikes," a resident told KSAZ. "And also the people that ride their cars. [The dogs] are always running after the cars and some of them get run over."

Chihuahuas are apparently the most common breed found in shelters, ABC News noted. The Maricopa County Animal Care and Control received 6,000 calls from Maryvale last year alone.

”Part of it is these animals aren’t spayed or neutered, so they’re out looking for a mate and are having babies, which also contributes to the problem," Melissa Gable with Maricopa County Animal Care and Control told ABC News, adding that residents are encouraged to call Animal Control if they see the stray dogs. The department will neuter them for free.

Chihuahuas are known to exhibit aggressive behavior despite their small size, according to Animal Planet. Despite weighing around 6 pounds, they have been known to go up against much larger dogs.

Last year, a 6-year-old girl wound up in the hospital after being attacked by a pack of Chihuahuas in Oregon, KPTV reported.

Read more - 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/24/packs-of-chihuahuas-arizona_n_4848543.html?utm_hp_ref=green