Comment by stevoski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevoski | Hacker News Reader

When Google got into advertising, they were relaxed about what ads they accepted. They happily ran just about any advert. But then two things happened.

1) the scammers came.

2) governments started holding Google accountable for running ads for online gambling and prescription medication. Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo) had to pay large fines for running ads for products and companies that governments saw as illegal.

As the years passed, Google has become ever more restrictive in what ads it will run. To the point where trigger-happy Google Adwords staff whose job is to approved ads reject many ads that are actually fine.

I think Facebook will go down the same path.

My main product is software used by poker players to track and analyse their winnings and losses. I haven't been able to advertise on Google for years, because the ad reviewers see the word 'poker' and demand proof that I am certified to running a gambling company in the locales I'm advertising in. I've given up trying to argue my case to Google that just because my product has the word 'poker' in the title doesn't mean I'm running a casino!

Facebook, however, still approves my adverts within a few hours. I'm expecting this to stop as Facebook tightens up after a few large government fines.

I have a lot of experience with the Facebook ad approval process from a stint running affiliate ads on the platform many years ago.

I was able to discover an oddity in the approval process, that created an arbitrage opportunity for me that was quite lucrative in the online dating space.

This was very nice since I had just finished college in 2008 and the global economy and job market stood in ruins all around me, and I really, really didn't want to get a 9-5 job.

My efforts were very tame (and within Facebook guidelines) compared to what other affiliates engaged in. At one end were cloaking scripts based on geolocation. Facebook ad reviewers were sent to one landing page, and visitors to another shadier and more profitable one.

But even more egregious, an affiliate acquaintance I met once bribed a Facebook employee, who set his account to autoapprove any ad he wanted. He used this to advertise Google Is Hiring: Work from Home credit card rebill offers. He told me he made $80,000 in the four days it took Facebook to discover it.

It was a cat and mouse game between Facebook and the affiliates in those days. This was after a short period where Facebook itself allowed these credit card rebills to be advertised on the site.

Affiliate marketing was a nice cash infusion for me at the time, but I am glad to have walked away from what is really the bottom of the barrel in the internet marketing world.

What are you doing these days in the paid traffic space?

Ha, that reminds me of the cas where one of our advertiser's creatives kept getting disapproved by Google's creative approval process. The ad was for a family hotel somewhere in Germany. It took a while to find out why the creative got disapproved. After quite a bit of back and forth with our technical account manager, they finally told us because the landing page contained the word "casino". Except it's a German-language website, and in German, that word can have different meanings than just being gambling-related. And that family hotel most certainly did not provide any gambling facilities.

Facebook's ad platform is very mature, it was launched in 2007.

I think Facebook is able to let more questionable stuff run in part because the micro-targeting makes it easy to disperse bad stuff to narrowly targeted audiences. On Google, investigators could search well known pharmaceutical terms and it was plain as day the advertisers were breaking US law. It is kind of like putting crack for sale in your storefront window verse in the back behind a maze of doors.

From what I have heard first hand, Facebook's platform was much more difficult initially and now is more lax. This could be in part the sheer scale of their ad network and the difficulty in policing it, or everyone figured out which loopholes Facebook couldn't plug without screwing up their quarterly numbers.

Generally, the older an advertising platform the less mature it is. DFP is horrid and Liverail is a bit better than AdJuggler but less sophisticated than AOL's or SpotX.

> it was launched in 2007

An ads platform launched in 2007. The current one is very much an entirely new platform.

Regarding Google AdWords, the scrutiny depends on your size. I am seeing a lot of ad scams in big companies. For example, looking for fiber optic Internet on an ISP without the offering and ending up on a fake landing page. Example (in Spanish): http://suscripcion.fibertel.com.ar/Servicio-Fibertel-12Megas... (from the query fibertel fibra optica)

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