No they are not. They are only effective for very specific and narrow Brand promoting.
Email marketing, Bing and Google, and Amazon ads are all far, far more effective than Facebook ads are, or ever will be.
You can "Boost" a facebook post, get 100's of thousands of views/impressions and 1000's of likes on it. Yet, maybe a small handful of users actually convert into a sale. That is simply not worth the money nor time. And of the users who have "liked" your ad, very few actually engage again unless you "Boost" another post. There have been countless write-ups about this supposed "Facebook sanctioned click-net" of users who somehow "like" everything yet never actually engage.
1) It requires very little trust to FB connect a site. FB now lets you explicitly control what they can access and what they can post, very easily. This used to be an issue, but not anymore.
2) True, but when you are a startup it's better to focus on making your experience great for some people than making it OK for all people. You should definitely support non-FB users over time, but it's pretty reasonable to have a single code path at launch.
It's because a Facebook connected user is just a much more valuable user to your service. You have access to their friend list, photos, likes, etc. And it's easy.
Sure, they could do the work to let non-FB connected users in as well, but given the scale of FB and the value of FB data, it's really hard to justify that work until you've hit product market fit.
When you only have one path to sign up and register it's really easy to focus and make that path as high quality as possible. Later you can add support for the people that want to use your product but don't have FB.
This was a no-solicit agreement, not a no-hire. If you were working at Apple and wanted to work at Google, you could just apply and get hired.
And then you could get a counter-offer from your current employer. Nobody stopped this from happening, and a lot of engineers made a lot of money doing exactly this.
> And then you could get a counter-offer from your current employer. Nobody stopped this from happening, and a lot of engineers made a lot of money doing exactly this.
61. Third, each agreed that if either made an offer to such an employee of the other company, neither company would counteroffer above the initial offer. This third agreement was created with the intent and effect of eliminating "bidding wars," whereby an employee could use multiple rounds of bidding between Pixar and Lucasfilm to increase her total compensation.
Not to mention major wins in healthcare, Iraq, and avoiding the major impending economic collapse that was in place when he took office.
He's no saint, and I'm as pissed as anyone about the illegal wiretapping that happened under his administration. But keep in mind that no major politician will agree 100% with your views. And no president can or will keep 100% of his promises considering this shifting political climate and his limited powers in our government.
>Ok, not saying that Obama has been 100% perfect in his presidency so far, but are you really implying that he's been an awful president?
Yes, yes I am. And if I thought I had any chance of convincing someone who still promotes Obama's "wins" at this point in his presidency, I'd argue it with you. But I don't.
I will leave you with one thought, which is that it's not even the blanket surveillance of the American people that's been Obama's most horrific failure, it's this:
"...are you really implying that he's been an awful president?"
Every president in the modern context has been and will be awful, even if to somewhat varying degrees. The problem is not the people in office, it's the office itself. It's important that the media emphasize personalities and the infinitesimal differences between them, so the average citizen can make-believe that some presidents are better than others.
I highly doubt it was that little. I've seen quite a few acquihire term sheets and the payoffs are a lot better than you would think for the founders.
I bet the investors get their money back, the founders of Cover get $2m - $4m each in stock alone (vesting over 4 years of course), and the employees get $500k / year in total comp.
I'd be very interested in hearing why a consumer would use bitcoins when a credit card option is available to them. The only reasons I can come up with are:
- The user is a bitcoin evangelist
- The user bought/mined bitcoins early and wants to cash in without selling them which would incur an exchange fee and tax hit.
- The user would prefer anonymity for that txn. Assumes no physical delivery (e.g. online porn)
- The merchant offers a steep discount for btc. But why would a merchant offer a fee more than the 0.35% referenced in the article?
And yet, the stats presented in the post seem to suggest otherwise. After they finish watching the porn, users click the ad and convert. Even if they click and convert at a lower rate than traditional media the data suggests that the lower CPMs more than make up for this.
It's not great for brand advertising (potentially). But for affiliate type marketing this seems like an untapped goldmine.
Have you tried working with third parties like Nanigans or Tellapart to optimize your ads?