It's probably more than creating awareness for their dev services. From what I can see, they're rapidly increasing partnership efforts for their ad-based products (e.g. AdX integration). Could be a trojan-horse type of move to get in front of developers who will someday be serving ads to generate revenue.
- The approval process for FB ads is dead simple. Ads are usually approved in minutes vs Google day(s) long wait. The longest it'll probably take is a 1 to 2 hours (usually as a result of a new image upload). This makes it very easy to iterate and improve upon your result
- FB gives pricing flexibility. You can choose whether the objective is for branding (CPM) or if you're looking for conversion (CPC, CPA). The ad units lets you focus on your objective
There is a problem with a focus on getting "likes". It doesn't convert. Neither does it increase sales. It's a vanity metric. I just wrote a post to explain how small of a mileage like actually brings for the effort exerted. http://thomasdiong.com/post/65443615643/social-media-vanity-...
I've never pushed for a focus on getting likes; instead, it is just one stage in the conversion funnel.
I consider them akin to email addresses, just with a much more variable ROI. You do have to manage your fan base, cultivate it and engage it as you would a large mailing list. They are definitely not a direct revenue driver though.
As an affiliate I've not used FB pages to profit, but I've got a few friends in the industry that have pages with massive followings. They are very skilled at monetizing their followers, but it is also an extremely tough thing to do. It is definitely not for the faint of heart - or wallet :)
Hmm, this is interesting. What we've found is the direct opposite. Facebook is 4 times cheaper than Google for us. But I suppose the nature of our companies are different. We're in the movie industry and Google search on movies that were released a couple of months ago are almost always queries looking for pirated sources.
Interesting. I can imagine how ads on such searches would do poorly!
We sell custom bottle caps, and usually people searching for terms in that area are looking for something like us (or us in particular) and are ready to buy. So search advertising is good for us; but even targeted to home brewers we didn't get much traction off Facebook, where people aren't usually looking to buy. It was worth a try, but not a good fit for us. I do think it has some general branding/awareness use, but that's hard to quantify, and we don't really need that right now, certainly at FB's prices.
Basically, private Hacker News for organizations to share and discuss online articles. This is awesome. Something that I didn't know I need but now I just can't wait to try!
One of my biggest pet peeves is endless emails sent to everyone in the organization by someone who just wanted to share an article that he/she thought was interesting. Then someone replies all with a comment, another person replies all, and soon, my email client just kept on buzzing even if the topic doesn't concern or interest me.
And the most frustrating thing is there's no rule that I can create to filter out those kind of emails.
This is very, very useful. Kudos to the Kippt team.
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One of my biggest pet peeves is endless emails sent to everyone in the organization by someone who just wanted to share an article that he/she thought was interesting. Then someone replies all with a comment, another person replies all, and soon, my email client just kept on buzzing even if the topic doesn't concern or interest me.
> And the most frustrating thing is there's no rule that I can create to filter out those kind of emails.
FYI, Gmail lets you mute threads, which addresses this exact use case.
This can even happen in a tech company. More often than not, this is an issue with managers who are non-techie. They're not sure what automation will do, and since they don't know what's going on when processes are automated, they're reluctant to try. #3 can plague any company. It happened at Apple as well, in supply chain, far away from product engineering.
You know how every product on the Apple Online Store has details on how long it'll take to be delivered to you? E.g. 2 Business Days, 1-2 Weeks, Within 24 Hours. These quotes are manually changed. That's right. Every product on every Apple Online Store (e.g. Singapore, Hong Kong, China, US etc) has their own quote, and these need to be changed manually by someone.
I remember I hated the manual work and made several automation scripts that'll just do everything for me. The managers wanted to have nothing to do with it. "What if the script screws up?". That was their biggest concern. We all know that programs are more consistent than human being so that's nothing to be worried over.
I was only able to convince the managers that automation is an improvement after having everyone in the department using the script without their permission.
I suspect their reluctance was also due to some degree of "if it's not broken, don't fix it".
Likely the humans will fail more often than the automation. I worked in a place where they didn't trust automation to copy 1000 files from one server to another so they had someone manually copy the files every morning. I bet he missed a few every day.
In that article, Mark Suster cover a counter example where instead of pushing to become profitable when revenue is almost overtaking cost, companies that are in a fast growing market should consider forsaking profit today for higher growth tomorrow.
Obviously, that depends entirely on the investment climate.
Hmm, the huge difference between US and <>US are mostly self-imposed I think. Self-serve ads are only available for businesses or individuals in US.
Outside of US, to even participate in ad-buys, you'll have to seek out Twitter's agency partners (not transparent, therefore, not obvious who they are), and when you find them, you'll have to commit to a minimum of $10,000 spend over a period of 3 months, which is highly prohibitive. I understand why they're doing this, but that's for another post.
What this means to the difference in revenue per 1000 timeline views is the kind of audience businesses are likely to target. If you are buying ads in the US, you'll most likely buy ads to target people living in US and if you're living outside of US, your target audience will likely be outside of US.
Since self-serve ads are fully accessible in US to anyone, the amount of money spent is obviously a couple of magnitude larger. That means higher competition (read:bidding) and higher revenue, and therefore revenue per 1000 timeline view to Twitter.
The US will still be more expensive than everywhere else even if everyone could purchase ads the same way, but the difference wouldn't be at such magnitude.
> If you are bootstrapping in your side, you will likely work 19 hrs a day and face failure after failure with nearly everyone around finding reasons to make you and your decisions look stupid.
Great point. This is actually not constrained to India but propagate through most of Asia, including the generally rich Singapore. Seems like a favorite "past-time" to watch people fail. It's a society that lives by the saying "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down".
Which is why Silicon Valley is such an attractive place to pursue a startup. The support system is there and there are little social stigma attached to failure.
Failing after putting in all the long hours and weekends is not something that is easy to stomach alone. Failing and having everyone around you rub it in is brutal.
