How Facebook’s Oracular Algorithm Determines the Fates of Start-Ups - best price electric toothbrush

No one would mistake Ben Cogan and Jesse Horvitz for "brogrammers", and these happy male programmers have a big swing in technology.
Nor are they scammers, ruthless extroverts who resign for the sake of adventure.
They are two angry friends, aged 27 and 29, who until recently lived across the street from Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Horvitz works for Columbia University Endowment Fund
Cogan has a job of analyzing consumer behavior.
Their hobbies are quiet.
Kegan dreams of getting a PhD. D.
One day philosophy
"After all this has been said and done," he said . ".
Horvitz likes to keep track of all aspects of his life in Excel spreadsheets: visiting restaurants, reading books, jogging.
He said scrolling through the files would give him a kind of data --Based on nostalgia.
For years, the two have had dinner together every week, where people often turn to business ideas. Spit-
Plan to start
Ups became their dream football.
One night in the summer of 2015, during the Han dynasty on 85 th Street in Sichuan province, Kegan consulted Horvitz about his latest idea: selling contact lenses online.
The contact business is dominated by a handful of companies like Johnson & Johnson and Bausch & Lomb that seem to want to charge anything --
At least in Cogan's view, this is based on the price increase of his own lens. Surely a low-
Cost competitors may attract customers.
Kegan took out his laptop from his bag and opened it at the table for dinner, pushing away a plate of dumplings and scallions.
He has two plans to show Horvitz.
They can sell cheap disposable lenses to doctors.
Or they can imitate Cogan's employer, a very successful start.
It's called Harry.
By the end of 2015, Harry's department store, which sells safety razors and shaving cream, became a pioneer in emerging online retailers known as direct sales. to-
Consumer companies
The business model works like this: companies sell their products only through their own websites.
By cutting back on retailers and distributors, their specialty products can charge less than their entrenched competitors.
That year, Casper, then a directto-
Consumer sellers of mattresses and bedding are reported to have more than $100 million in sales in the second year.
Dollar Shave Club, another razor seller, earned $0. 152 billion.
Glasses supplier Warby Parker, who pioneered the business model in 2010, recently concluded a round of investments that reportedly valued the company at $1. 2 billion.
Venture capitalist
I believe that as consumers become more comfortable shopping online, they will increasingly visit professional online retailers.
Direct investment-to-consumer start-
According to CB Insights, ups has exceeded $2 billion over the past four years.
Horvitz, who has so far been bored with his work, has urged Cogan to continue pursuing his ideas and to volunteer to help him with his research.
"It's hard to be intelligent if an idea is good," Horwitz said . ".
"You have to start doing it, look.
"By February 2016, after sending many evening and weekend emails to Asian manufacturers and reading the Food and Drug Administration's compliance, the vision of a viable business became the focus.
The couple found an F. D. A. -
Recognized manufacturers in Asia, and figured out how to meet the necessary regulations.
Even so, Kegan is reluctant.
He was admitted to Wharton and even paid a deposit.
He thought it was a more sensible choice.
At best, contact-
The lens business will be a side project.
Before putting their adventure on hold, they decided to try another strategy.
They recruited two friends: Paul Rogers and Dan Rosen, a friend of Horvitz from Colombia, who knows how to write computer code, a friend of Cogan from Bronx Science, he is handy in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
The four companies have jointly created a demand experiment in the field of online retail.
Thanks to Harry's founder (
Who gave it the basic code?
Equivalent to one or twopage website.
The first page explains the concept of monthly subscription contacts and asks interested people to submit their email addresses.
Visitors who do this are taken to the second page and get a quote: share this referral code with friends and you get a free contact if enough of them sign up.
They posted links to their website on the walls of about 40 Facebook friends.
Within a few days, not only did some friends sign up, but also friends of friends signed up --
There are about 2,000 people in total.
Some of these distant connections even promote the company on their own Facebook wall. “It went mini-
Said Cogan.
He and Horvitz applied for a technology incubator.
An organization that invests and directs young companies in exchange for minority stakes-
Use the demand experiment as their 16-
Page PowerPoint presentation.
They also invited venture capitalists based in New York.
They decided that if they were allowed to enter the incubator they would be working on the project full time.
If not, Kegan will go to Wharton.
By April, they were not only recalled for interviews with five incubators;
The venture fund has also proposed a total investment of $3.
Their idea is 5 million.
Cogan gave up his Wharton plan.
He and Horvitz ordered 50,000 contact lenses, Rosen as creative director and Rogers as chief technology officer, who started working in the investor's office, the wall next to the table is stacked with the box and the lens of the box.
They eventually named their enterprise Hubble after an orbital telescope that could see the depths of space.
Facebook helped them succeed in the demand test;
Now it will generate their first sale.
In the summer of 2016, a friend of a potential investor in Hubble, a beginning --
A senior advertising company named Joshua Liberson suggested that the founder try a new Facebook ad called "leading advertising.
No external website required: Will-
Be customers simply click on a button on the ad to submit their email address directly from Facebook.
Hubble put the ads on zip codes in New York and Chicago, where they have registered optometrists willing to write prescriptions.
After people click on the ad, Horwitz notifies them by email to coordinate appointments and accept orders.
On November, the Hubble online store officially opened.
2016, Cogan and Horwitz know how to launch a Facebook advertising campaign, which they believe will continue to create sales.
They plan to spend three more dollars.
7 million they raise money almost entirely through Facebook ads.
In 2017, everyone seems to be wondering: Is Facebook taking over the world?
Most of us now realize that social networks are far more than the repository of selfies and political rhetoric for 2 billion users.
For advertisers, Facebook is now a gluttonous monster that has eaten up the digital advertising business in the United States with Google;
According to the mindtal Research Group, the two companies controlled 70% of the market share and most of the growth in 2016.
From the perspective of US intelligence agencies, Facebook is actually a weapon, and a company associated with the Kremlin uses at least $2016 in targeted advertising to incite extremism and influence 100,000 presidential elections.
For those with privacy issues, Facebook plays the big brother role, collects more data about what we like, what we post and what we buy, even by clicking on the GPS locator on the phone to track where we are online and in the real world.
Thinking about Facebook.
Far-reaching, it is worth remembering that the views of more than 5 million advertisers, whose funds fund the rampant growth of social networks.
Facebook and Instagram are fantasy things for them, and this company has them too --
A large market with unprecedented scale.
By advertising directly in the user's news feed, companies can target potential customers at any time of the day at moments when they are often bored and open to novelty.
What is the best time to hear about product promotion?
"Facebook has created the greatest commercial ad in the world," said Roger mcname, founder of Elevation Partners.
"It's really cheap to make ads and it's really cheap to get to the market you want.
So Facebook has become particularly profitable for companies trying to sell new products online.
Leaders of more than six new online retailers have told me that they spend most of their advertising on Facebook and Instagram. “In the start-up-
Industrial Complex, like the systematic transfer of funds for venture capital
Capital companies will start
Charlie Mulligan, founder of BrewPublik, said the company uses "Beergorithm" to provide customers with personalized craft beer choices every month.
Of the 500 Startups funded by Silicon Valley's tech incubator BrewPublik, Facebook advertising is the subject of the course.
In fact, society
Nowadays, online advertising is a prerequisite for anyone who studies marketing in a technology incubator --
Or any business school in the country.
"There is a formula for this kind of thing," Mulligan said . ".
"The reason for having a formula is because it works.
"The process is simple, cheap and effective.
An entrepreneur can put his or her ads before social ads with a few hundred dollars and a morning effort --
Media users that afternoon.
Not sure which ads are best companies can upload some ads to make Facebook manual
Smart software tests their efficacy.
If they don't know who should see their ads, they can embed the code on their website to enable Facebook to monitor traffic and then show the ads to the nearest visitors.
Or the company can send the email address of their existing customers to Facebook, it will find their Facebook account and in so-
Called look alikes, users like and click on the same thing as your fan base.
It's as simple as building an online dating profile.
Steph Korey, founder of New York-based, baggage company Away, which opened in 2015, said that when the company was established, its ads on Facebook earned $5 for every $1.
The convenience of opening a business on Facebook in turn has spawned a large number of professional digital sellers who rely on social networking algorithms to find early customers.
Many of them follow the same script and even have a similar aesthetic.
They spend their money on traditional public relations, on sponsored links next to Google's search results, on "influencers" marketing, or on giving their products to owning big social
Media attention, hope to cause a sensation.
Then they buy ads on Facebook and Instagram.
Inevitably, you will encounter them there: they feature stylish photos or video loops of products --a wood-
Water filter, wool shoes, electric toothbrush.
The top shows the company name in bold, usually ringing in the same friendly way, usually two-Syllable whimsySoma. Allbirds. Goby.
Ellie Wheeler, a partner at Greyventure Partners Venture Fund, said: "Sometimes we look at each other and say, 'God, they're too many. Invested in the Hubble telescope last year.
Her company also gained ownership in the booming market for selling health food; Plated, a meal-
Express delivery service;
A suitcase club that mailed a box of clothes to the customer;
Ilokui, a quick
Retailers specializing in high fashion.
While not all of these companies and others like them can survive, many are infringing on established brands that are taking the threat seriously.
European consumer Unilever, July 2016
It is reported that the company acquired Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion.
In June, Wal-Mart agreed to buy Bonobos, an Internet company.
Clothing brands worth $0. 31 billion.
Companies that sell products exclusively online continue to grow faster than any other type of retailer in the US
According to Euromonitor International, about 17% a year since 2011, more than six times the total retail sales.
Facebook has even been taking steps to influence offline sales in order to put traditional retailers on track.
In September, social networks launched a tool that allows businesses with physical stores to display ads to shoppers and their looks even if they go to the store but don't buy anything.
Facebook is increasingly expanding its business to the U. S. market.
One afternoon in three months, I watched Rosen pick three new ads from an extensive photo shoot a week ago, his third in four months.
Rosen is sleeping.
Deprived new parents
The hair is messy and the eyes are dull.
He spoke monotonous.
He attributed his fatigue to Facebook's artificial intelligence.
Smart software to place Hubble ads.
Rosen and his colleagues simply refer to it as an "algorithm ".
The basic component of Facebook ads is a set of ads.
It includes the choice of the ad itself and the other three categories: Audience, Target, and budget.
On that day, Rosen was designing a set of scenes that would be accessible to those viewers who had visited hub blecont's Instagram.
In the last 30 days.
His goal is to "convert" or persuade users who have seen the company's ads to make purchases.
Finally, he made a budget of $1,000 a day.
He uploaded three pictures.
Now, they are ready for testing to see if any of them are winners in the eyes of users and algorithms.
What happened at 8m.
The next morning, the situation was complicated when the ad set became active --
Far from the human eye.
Just before Facebook puts ads in its user feed, it makes an instant auction to determine which advertiser gets the space.
Of course, each advertiser's bid amount is affected by the size of its budget, but the algorithm also measures its understanding of the company, advertising, and Facebook's individual users.
The algorithm tries to image an intuitive matchmaker acting the same way, drawing inferences from personal interests, current online behavior, the potential value of users to each advertiser, and the general appeal of advertising.
Sometimes the winner is The Advertiser who gives Facebook the most money.
Sometimes the algorithm will decide that you are more likely to click on a different ad and reward the advertiser with less money.
This detailed process involves thousands of advertisers at each auction.
As Facebook users load their feeds, there are millions of auctions per minute.
The process has never been the same twice.
The algorithm is constantly learning to use past results to inform how it measures bids at its next auction.
Facebook says the goal is to maximize everyone's value: pair advertisers with their most likely customers and show ads users want to see.
Of course, make money for Facebook.
But from Rosen's point of view, nothing happened before he walked into the office a little bit after 10. m.
Facebook spent a total of $1. 86 on his ads.
It shows the first ad to 51 people, the second to 45, and the third to only two.
The first ad was clicked once.
Rosen poured himself a single coffee in a hurry. serve machine.
The algorithm will take a while to warm up, he said.
"It will get exciting in an hour.
After 20 minutes, Rosen refreshed his browser.
The Ads Manager window shows the latest numbers: Rosen can only see the results, not the process of producing the results, but clicking seems to inspire the algorithm's favor for the first ad.
In these 20 minutes, the first advertisement appeared in front of 76 people.
That said, it won 76 auctions than the other two ads.
In the next hour, the algorithm presented the first ad to more and more users, featuring photos of colored Hubble boxes in a blue background;
Obviously, the algorithm has begun to support it.
When Rosen refreshes his browser, it feels like watching the seeds sprout.
Ads have more views.
Some lead to clicks.
Finally, between 11: 28 A. M. m. and 11:53 a. m.
One of the clicks resulted in the first sale of the test.
Business is booming.
It felt strange at that moment.
Obviously, there is science behind the scenes;
The algorithm is a set of rules written by Facebook engineers.
But from where Rosen sits, the action may be managed by the Holy Spirit.
Artificial Facebook
The intelligent algorithm shuttles through the server farm, touches 2 billion users, finds a person, and shows her a Hubble ad on Instagram
She used her credit card to buy a subfee for contact lenses.
The first ad quickly created two more sales.
The algorithm began to increase its bid to represent Hubble, thus winning more advertising space auctions and spending more money on advertising space --
The first is $1 for a minute, then $2 for a minute, and then $3 or more. By 2 p. m. , Facebook’s A. I.
$306 was charged to Hubble.
Put this ad in front of 9,684 users
The second ad cost $8.
It was almost abandoned in 03 years.
The third ad has little chance: It starts at 8 in the morning. m.
It only appeared before 30 people.
Rosen shook his head and said, "I don't know why . ".
Rosen can see a variety of neatly arranged data on Facebook's Ad Manager program: views, clicks, sales, and the average cost of acquiring each new customer.
But none of the metrics at Rosen's fingertips solve a fundamental mystery: why the algorithm behaves like it, why it prefers some ads instead of others, and why the third one
The ads in the morning are very similar: the company's Instagram handle "hub blecont" appears on the top with photos of peaches, blue, yellow and green boxes.
The only difference is that the first ad shows the contact lens box lined up in a blue background;
In the second and third ads, they were set to object to pinkand-
The blue background is arranged diagonally in the second and diagonally in the third.
But they're all just boxes!
Do Instagram users really prefer to contact?
Is there a tight box or a lens ad with a blue background?
Is there any rule in the algorithm that is conducive to orderly arrangement? (
The Hubble team knows that Facebook likes certain aesthetics. )
When the first ad happens to click for the first time in the morning, to what extent is the result of the day dynamic and actually random?
Rosen can only guess.
Advertising has always been an uncertain industry.
No one knows why, to be exact, some people react to advertisements in newspapers or on TV, not to mention why a particular person decides to buy a product. (
The oldest cliché in the advertising world, which is often considered to be part of the department --
"Half of my ads have been wasted.
The trouble is, I don't know which half. ”)
But to make money in advertising, you don't need to be completelyknowing;
Your ad only needs to work better than your competitor's.
To this end, advertisers inevitably seek a combination of the two main ways.
They test and refine their information in an attempt to produce a message as efficiently and targeted as possible (junk-
Pre-approved credit mail-
Card discount, for example).
Or they show a huge scene that will definitely attract someone (
Super Bowl advertisers).
In the early 2010 s, directto-
Consumer companies have appeared.
However, due to the lack of funds for large TV advertising activities, they rely instead on the old ones
Public Relations, gorgeous and lucky.
Warby Parker hired a public.
The relationship company promoted its concept to Vogue and GQ and released its website to users on the same day.
During the fashion week, it also held an event at the New York Public Library featuring models wearing glasses.
The initial success of the dollar shaving club was due to the clever timing of its founder, Michael Dubin, for both business and comedy.
He made an interesting, low
The budget video introduced his company and then uploaded it to YouTube on the same day TechCrunch reported the Dollar Shave Club's first round of venture capital.
In a few days, people immediately watched the South at the Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.
Du Bin visited 3 million times on the Internet.
Facebook's sales strategy
Due to the miracle of data technology, put the right ads in front of the right people
Not completely new.
Back in 1964, William Allan, a business editor at Pittsburgh Press, reported that in the near future, "computers will tell merchants that half of their advertising budget is wasted.
Thirty years later, The Economist described efforts to leverage American Express's trading records: "powerful data --
A computer called a large-scale parallel processor equipped with neural networks.
Network Software (
Search for patterns in large amounts of data like the human brain)
Put forward the vision of marketing nirvana.
Companies like Acxiom, Experian and Datalogix have been providing similar data --
Mining services for direct marketers over the years.
Facebook (and Google)
In addition to scale and complexity.
A recent study by Princeton University professor Arvind Narayanan and PhD candidate Steven Englehardt shows how thorough the two online giants are in monitoring user behavior.
In early 2016, they used special robots they developed to search the world's top 1 million websites for tracking mechanisms.
Google has trackers on 76% of them, and Facebook has trackers on 23% of them. (
Twitter, which ranks third, has trackers on more than 12% of websites. )
Technology giants can analyze all of this data, look for patterns, and then match them with potential customers.
It also makes Facebook and Google stand out from their direct business --
Marketing predecessors believe that they can reach daily advertisers.
Anyone with a credit card can test ads online on the Facebook platform, one of the most complex direct ads --
Marketing operations.
But while the machine can be used by ordinary people, there are still many mysteries about how it works.
Methods and calculations of algorithms-
Why does it end up pushing some ads instead of othersare all hidden.
Almost at first, Rosen, Horvitz, and the rest of Hubble were determined to understand the secret of the algorithm --
Find out why some ads are successful and some are not.
Soon, they exchanged assumptions with other entrepreneurs, criticized ideas from advertisements from other companies, and adopted formal testing methods rooted in scientific methods.
For example, they uploaded ads with the same picture but different wording.
The Hubble team finally summed up all sorts of things. Ads with third-
Party endorsement
From GQ, said the US news aggregator site-
Defeat those people with their own slogans
Close-up ads-
The Hubble telescope performed better than the human model.
Advertisements containing "shop now" or "Learn More" buttons perform worse than those without buttons;
Viewers can access the site by simply clicking anywhere on the picture.
But even if the Hubble team gains more from Facebook's successful ads, the algorithm may be unpredictable, almost Moody.
If you load the same ads in the same ad set every day, they also stop playing.
The founders initially thought that users were tired of the same ads.
But the actual number of viewers shows that few individual users see any ads more than once.
The algorithm itself seems boring.
At the same time, in the evening, the algorithm spent a lot of money and rarely found customers.
Hubble's executives began to cut their budgets at 11: 00. m.
They call it "putting the algorithm on the bed.
"This algorithm may also be impulsive, and it will also drag the mud.
Some days it may happen suddenly, blowing thousands of dollars in a few hours, nothing to show.
At any time, any of the 15 different ad series can get out of control.
Rosen found himself forced to view the advertising manager on his laptop and iPhone. (
Facebook provides iOS apps for advertisers. )
"It has always occupied my brain," he said . "
"Is that the kind of 'Did you turn the oven on?
One night, we went to a station.
Comedy night Rosen is at a bar in Brooklyn called Muchmore's. (
He has been a part-time comedian for the past four years. )
But, while other comics are on stage, Rosen has been in the position of advertising manager.
"Who cares about jokes?
Then he quipped.
For help, Rosen sought guidance from Faheem Siddiqi, a former Facebook employee who now runs his own marketing agency.
Hubble's sales representative at Facebook told him that Siddiqi had found the best way to optimize Facebook's advertising campaign.
But it turns out that Siddiqi and his employees are more forced to check the advertising manager than Rosenevery half-
An hour, up to 16 hours a day.
When I asked Siddiqi to share his tips on managing Facebook ads, he replied, "The first step is meditation.
"It's like a baby," Jesse Horvitz told me . ".
"If you walk for more than half an hour without checking in, it may be dead. ” (
Married Horvitz has no children yet. )Middlemen —
Creative organizations, media planning, publishers
Advertising has long dominated the business.
Until recently, however, they have not been as ubiquitous, opaque and inhuman as Facebook.
Social giants are now more comprehensive and accurate than ever before about what ads we see and who sees them.
Some of these meanings are interesting, while others are disturbing.
In my house, the strange new world of advertising announced itself in the form of water tanks. The Soma 6-
Cup pitcher is a model of Brooklyn beauty: folk oak handle, stylish and simple reservoir, filtered cones made of coconut shells (or something).
I have never heard of it before my wife ordered it online.
I don't have many friends.
Half of our guests were like me when they opened the fridge: Soma ignorance.
The other half knew the brand immediately: Hey hey! You got a Soma?
They saw pitchers everywhere on Facebook and Instagram.
For some people, what is a familiar brand is completely unknown to me and others.
We were divided up.
This is something I noticed over and over again: I saw an ad for a running app Aaptiv;
My wife saw an advertisement for a furniture site called "article" but I never visited it.
Like Facebook manipulating conservative and free talk points for users who have already shared these views, we are also divided into business bubbles.
Recently, ProPublica, investigation --
The news nonprofit shows how bad actors abuse the process: Facebook's software, for example, gives advertisers the option to target "Jewish haters ".
In another survey, ProPublica found that Facebook made it possible to exclude specific "racial affinity" and noted that the federal housing and employment Act prohibits race-based advertising.
This stereotype is not a small problem with the Facebook machine --
Learning process-
That's how software works.
To develop an audience, the algorithm browses and analyzes audience profiles based on shared features, relevance, and self-traits
It assumes that our preferences divide us into tribes that can be targeted.
Facebook and advertisers have a responsibility to limit this unethical process in a moral and legal way.
However, the ethics of targeting is not clear --cut.
According to the Australian Daily, Facebook employees have prepared a document showing how they can gather details about teenagers in vulnerable moments --
When Facebook users feel "stressed", "insecure", "failed" or "worthless.
Is it unethical or is it simply rude?
These challenges open up new fronts for companies and businesses.
Responsible for supervision.
Bad human actors are not the only problem; a machine-
If it is not checked, the learning algorithm itself will have wrong behavior and compound inequality, and no human help is needed.
Same mechanism, decision 30-
Some women like to buy yoga tights from lulululemon.
And show them more ads for yoga costumes
More garbage will also be displayed.
Advertising food to poor people with diabetes and obesity.
"Sometimes the behavior of data is immoral," Antonio Garcia-
Martinez, a Facebook employee who worked on the advertising team, wrote in an article in The Guardian.
He provided an example from his time at the company: "Someone on the data --
The science team has developed a new tool to recommend Facebook pages that users should like.
How did this tool start to spit out?
Every racial stereotype you can imagine.
As algorithms sort users in more and more complex ways --
The multiple criteria for determining similar groups have violated human understanding --
Regulators and companies will have to face the question of how to determine who is being pushed, why, and whether this is good for the public or aggravating social ills.
Algorithms that learn from the current reality can't count on themselves to improve future processes. Facebook’s A. I.
Garcia: definitely not unattended.
Facebook decided not to release referral tools, Martinez wrote.
Facebook says it is working to prevent harmful advertising.
For example, it does not allow payday loans on advertising to be prey to the poor.
It says it has removed the ability of advertisers to position users by race when promoting housing, employment or credit;
It removed "Jewish haters" and other objectionable categories and said it would add human comments on its ads
Aim option.
In response to the report in Australia, Facebook said the analysis was "designed to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook.
It has never been used to target ads.
However, managing a platform in this way --
Look at the algorithm and what mischief its users are doing, and then respond with a countermeasure --
It is difficult to maintain.
"This is a heavy blow. a-
The Mole problem is a problem on Facebook . "
Martinez told me.
It makes Facebook, a company still largely controlled by one person, Mark Zuckerberg, the ultimate arbiter of morality and taste for all of its 2 billion users.
It also means that when the company adjusts its system, it has unilateral powers to create or destroy the company.
This is not the possibility of an assumption.
In 2013, media sites like the BuzzFeed Partner Network (including BuzzFeed, Thought Catalog, and the New York Times) have noticed a surge in the number of Facebook referrals
From August to October, the number of page views increased by 50 million.
A year later, Facebook announced an adjustment to its news.
Feed algorithm for eliminating so
Call click bait
Upworthy, a story vendor titled "9 of the 10 Am Eriksson people are completely wrong
Shocking, "in three months, its total number of views fell by half, from 90 million to 48 million. (
At the time of these huge shifts, 30% of Americans got news from Facebook.
In the US, the Pew Research Center. )
"We always knew Facebook was a bit like the weather," said Eli Pariser, Upworthy's partner.
Founder and President
"There will be sunny days and stormy days.
In response to the algorithm adjustment, Pariser instructed his staff to stop posting as many videos as possible to Google's YouTube and instead start posting more videos directly to Facebook.
"This is certainly good for Facebook," Pariser admits . "
"But you know, I can't reach 0. 2 billion people on any other media either," he quoted Upworthy's video on Facebook.
The platform may be fickle but still depends on it.
Imagine, now, Facebook has adjusted its algorithm --
Instead of causing severe fluctuations in network traffic to the provider of virus Video
Leading to a sharp decline in consumer advertising and sales
A product company happens to be the largest employer in the town.
Or imagine such an adjustment, or the industry as a whole has changed its practices to adapt to Facebook, shaking a number of companies.
Even the threats and uncertainties of these possibilities can hurt businesses, as their future project investments depend on predictable returns.
As we delegate more control to AI, businesses and users are moving into areas of uncertainty.
At the same time, more and more companiesstart-ups, mom-and-
Popular stores in major companies
Give their money and data to the society.
Internet giants.
Facebook's Ad Manager is a user. friendly.
Sufficient sales.
If you don't use it, your competitors will.
Why don't you go? By mid-
A few weeks after my first follow-up with Rosen, the Hubble team no longer has 15 Facebook and Instagram ad episodes. It had 40 —
All ads point to different audiences, each with its own.
But Rosen looked more rested, not so tired.
He explained that he and Paul Rogers have developed something that they call a "robot"
Dan, "check the ad manager a few lines of code every hour and then adjust the budget like Rosen did.
He can wake up and let the ad play (
Even though he had to fight the urge to check the robotDan).
He told me that they will upgrade to robots soon.
Dan 2 will switch in the new ad to take over the bedtime routine every night. (
He told me that with 40 viewers, the whole process lasted almost a whole episode of the evening show with Stephen Colbert. ”)
Finally, he said he had a certain distance from Facebook's daily plot.
He told me that he could go to bed early in the near future.
Or give yourself a night.
But by the end of June, Rosen's pressure-
A free life is still a dream.
A new problem arises: no matter what new ads they put in a set of ads, the sales growth rate has dropped and the cost of each acquisition has risen.
They began to think it was a question for the audience: did they find all the customers in these groups?
As their ads began to take off, the Hubble team scrambled to find fresh and fertile land.
They are more eccentric and eccentric about the new audience.
For a week, they focused on people who liked the salad chain Sweetgreen.
Next, they go to the people who show they are fans of bottled water, no matter who they are.
After a few days, each group failed.
The cost of each new customer is getting higher and higher; sales dwindled.
As they look for more and more audience descriptions, they come up with a new idea: they start trading their similar groups with other online retailers, people who believe that buying a product from social media may buy other products.
This kind of audience sharing is becoming more and more common on Facebook: even one company, TapFwd, brings together similar groups for a variety of brands to help them display ads to other groups.
Cogan and Horwitz have decided that they need to reduce their reliance on Facebook ads for the sake of their business and their own sanity.
In May, they tested their first 15-second cable-
TV commercials.
With TV, the data is more blurry and it takes longer to return the results.
However, although the old media gave them less information than Facebook, ignorance is happy in some ways.
"Less leverage;
Less pressure. ” Rodgers says.
"You can press the button to continue your life.
In August, the Hubble team finally handed over their domestic Facebook advertising work to an external agency, Ampush, which charged them fees based on the number of new customers registered.
Ampush now has 10 people working on Rosen and RoboDan.
Nevertheless, the handover was mixed.
"We counted their data.
Rosen said: "This is something we can beat, which means that if Hubble buys in advertising, it can get more customers for less money --house.
"But it will ruin our lives.
"Thanks largely to Facebook, Hubble is on track to complete its first full-year business, earning $20 million.
In August, Harber raised $10 million and the company valued it at $0. 21 billion.
In January, Hubble will use the funds to expand its business to the European continent.
Advertising strategy? Robo-
Dan, with the help of Rosen
As Haber moves into new territory, Facebook and algorithms will be tagged with them.