On the other hand, the vast majority of facebook users aren't out there trying to game social gaming mechanics, so I can't imagine that the overall number of fake accounts could be huge. A million at the most?
>" so I can't imagine that the overall number of fake accounts could be huge. A million at the most?"
Really? Do you have any evidence to support that? Because my experience working with a game that had about 1MM DAUs at its peak was completely different. The analysis wasn't perfect, because it's very difficult to prove there is no unique user on the other end. But there are behavioral queues. And we determined that 1/4 to 1/3 of the accounts playing our game were fake.
Have you spent much time playing these games? They're hyper competitive. So any mechanics which require or benefit a player by having more friends will be taken advantage of. Need 20 friends to advance past a level? It's far easier to make and use 20 Facebook accounts accounts than it is to spam your friends list for people to play, especially if no one on your list actually plays the game. The whole system was designed to promote this sort of activity. That's why I can't understand why people would be shocked at this. The ruse is good for users (more stuff!), good for the games and good for Facebook (more DAUs!).
Again, it's the industry's dirty little secret: nobody has any incentive to tell people that large numbers of people using their game or application aren't even real. That goes for Facebook, Zynga or any small gaming shop anywhere.
Do you think that they rally 20,000 people to "like" your page? Or do they have a script with many accounts?
The point is, nobody really knows how big of a problem this is. You seem to think it's small; my experience tells me that it's big. Either way, the data advertisers are using to determine spends and ROI is skewed in an undetermined direction.
Edit: Have you ever played World of Warcraft? Do you know how people use characters to store and transfer goods? Depending on the Facebook game, that principle can exist on a very large scale. Except, as opposed to WoW, every storage character is counted as a unique DAU. I would bet my life that any game where an edge can be gained by having multiple accounts has a large multiple account problem.
