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Comment by Strshps1MoreTim | Hacker News Reader

Not sure about that. A social network can collect a huge amount of information about a user and in the future with better algorithms offer very valuable ads. Helping the user to keep up with fashion, tech, etc.

To keep your analogy, Facebook to Google may be like TV advertisement to a local market.

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CPC on Facebook is fairly strong, the issue is CTR. Facebook is having to show an ad many more times to get a click.

From an ecommerce perspective I the difference in effectiveness is massive. I have found it very hard to really generate a lot of spending intent across the ads, retargeting, sponsored stories and offers. Whereas a good Adwords campaign across a large product inventory pretty much prints money and annoys users a lot less.

read up on the datawarehouse trend 10 yrs ago, you have to remain a viable company in order to take advantage of that stuff. turns out it's expensive and time-consuming to create value from generally-unstructured historical data even if you have an identity (or even just a demographic) attached to it.

Facebook has money and time. Plus a few hundred of the very best engineers in the valley, that joined pre-IPO.

These are engineering problems that are capital-h Hard, well beyond the level of graph theory they're using now.

You can take any complex web site or app and say it has functions beyond some math theory. But just hacking around is often enough for a good enough solution.

Why do you think FB, Amazon, or whoever don't have better recommendation/targeting algorithms than they have now if the solution was "just hacking around enough?" Not enough "enough?"

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