Posts this like are useless when the app and the ad placements in question are not known to us the readers, since then we can at least detect any real violations of Facebook Audience Network's policies.
The developer does not seem so concerned that the app was removed - it can be reinstated - but that the attempts to do so are being stonewalled while a significant amount of cash hangs in the balance.
Facebook should not be silent in the face of a $160,000 problem they created.
Can anyone backup those revenue numbers from past experience?
Curiously, the application name was not posted.
I don't want to call bullsh*t, but if the claims could be verified, the discussion can move on to how to actually deal with the situation.
I believe there are Facebook employees on HN, would it be possible to bring this matter to the attention of the concerned people, if the claims turn out to be valid?
And not just bring attention to this case but to make sure that there is actually some support.
I can't believe how Facebook can have business relations with someone on the order of magnitude of $100k a month and there isn't a single person at Facebook he can contact.
The original person (tihonovova) never said "USD". What you saw was someone else's (TheWhiteKnight's) comment on reddit.
However, the original person did use the symbol "$" and his Facebook screenshots used "$". So I do agree with you that he and Facebook do mean US dollars.
If it were Ukrainian currency, it would have said ?160,000 or UAH160,000. Can someone from the Ukraine confirm that you would never write $160,000 if you actually meant Ukrainian hryvni?
EDIT: Oops, sorry, you are correct, he did say it. His comment was in a collapsed reddit thread that I didn't see.
[–]guitartrashmaster 45 points 4 hours ago
Dude post on hacker news trust me
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[–]VikingIV -2 points 45 minutes ago
This.
Its the same with google; the only way for devs to get any kind of traction is by kicking up a fuss on HN. Its crazy that it has to be this way.
I think it captures what is happening with society.
If you're not famous, then you have effectively no legal rights unless something REALLY REALLY bad happens to you.
This is only going to get worse as the total number of violations by corporations increase and the media can no longer keep up with most of them - Only the most vile/blatant breaches will be punished.
I can easily imagine that in 20 years, there will be so many breaches of the law by corporations that they will get away with it most of the time... Or if we're lucky and the legal system still works, large corporations will be forced to hire huge numbers of lawyers to be able to defend themselves from the constant stream of claims.
I think that's because the economy has become so competitive that it's difficult for a company to turn a profit without committing lots of minor transgressions (their competitors are doing it). So the most profitable company ends up being the one which commits the most breaches and has the highest rate of success at getting cases against it thrown out of court.
Well, to some extent the OP is an edge case-- not every "little guy" gets his grievance any visibilty. However, twitter, reddit, HN, 4chan, and a blogs of all types make it possible to appeal to the public.
20 years ago the same thing occurred, but with less recourse. A company can have its image litigated in public and that can be good
20 years ago, there's less surface area for which you could be grieved on by a bigger corporation.
Today, where a lot of long tail exists within ecosystems (such as the various app stores), its much easier for a corp to do wrong, and not get punished as each individual infraction is much smaller, but occurr in larger numbers.
Start a shitstorm on HN, r/programming, eventually slashdot and hope it gets picked up by tech media to raise an even bigger shitstorm.
Ad companies like Google and Facebook are much more afraid of bad PR than angry developers, and sadly that has become the only way to get them to react. Most developers are absolutely insignificant to them.
Insert any other tech company here. Facebook, Twitter, Apple (Radar!)... they only react upon massive public outrage.
Actual user support staffed with humans instead of autobots costs insane amounts of money, and this is why the mentioned companies don't have user support, with an exception for paid add-ons (e.g. ads, Google Apps for Enterprise, Apple Care).
Sounds like a script that went awry, misclassifying the app? If so, I have a feeling that when some engineer at Facebook wakes up and sees this tomorrow, the problem will go away ;)
Unless you work at FB or have other info, I would definitely doubt that. Assuming this claim is legit, FB has not done a lot to instill any degree of confidence(for me) that they are a user-centric organization willing to compromise & work with customers.
FB, much like apple, is a closed off "our way or the highway" type company. It is utterly massive which not only gives it huge power, but makes it difficult to even find a human to rectify an issue. So I hope you are correct...but i doubt it.
This happened to someone using stripe; a similar case where the account was suspended and the user was upset about the inability to capture revenue.
I trust stripe a lot more than FB, that said, PC showed up in the thread as well as numerous suppory staff. The claim was similar, big money rev processing suspended but limited details. It turned out that the user was violating the terms and had been notified well in advance. The user stopped responding to other posters asking for details and it was immeadiately evident that it was a pretty shady & onesided story.
Now, FB is quite restrictive-- but until the user substantiates the nature of their application & facebook's violations & correspondence; I can't really cry foul.
The user said they didn't want to mention the app because it would be "promoting it". Idk, it does feel a bit off. Take Dash/kapeli, they blamed apple for kicking them out of the app store, and while they are well known, they stood behind their name and identity which is all the reputation one has on the internet.
So, i hope this is rectified but mire evidemce is surely needed
When you are getting the types of numbers mentioned by the app creator and you mention the name of the app, you invite unoriginal competition and Denial-of-Service attacks if possible.
I'm very suspicious of the fact that he doesn't give the name of the app or explain what it does, but you make a very good point.
If he is making this kind of money--and he mentions that it wasn't much effort to write the app--he'd kill the golden goose if he reveals what it does.
This title's grammar is mangled and confusing on HN. The $160000 was for the developer, not for anyone else. The "for those who use Facebook ads" was a separate clause saying who the post is for.
I know HN approves of original titles but also disapproves of sensationalism and exclamation points. I would suggest something like:
And they didn't steal it either. They just didn't pay it out yet, it says pending. And even if it was canceled or whatever, "steal" is not the right word since they were never his money to begin with.
To me it seems that like with any contract, the money is his once he fulfilled his part of the deal (ad views/clicks). I agree that not payout out is not the same as stealing, but in this case it does seem awfully close since Facebook is acting as a middle man. If someone hires me to do a job for a 3rd party, gets paid for my work, but doesn't pass me my part - I'd call this stealing.
But if it was determined that the part you did was done fraudulently? That's essentially FB's position here. And their contract states that the remedy for that is account termination and forfeiture of the balance.
After that I appealed to them many times but never got the answer.
I must be missing something somewhere. This story doesn't sound right to me, but I don't know the systems involved.
Can somebody tell me how over 100K can be at stake and this guy can't even get a real person to talk to? Ok, I understand the old "push popular stuff on the web and let the robots handle support" routine. But 160K? Really?
It happens with all big companies- once your app/account gets marked for fraud(and it looks like this one might have been, possibly incorrectly), absolutely no one will talk to you. The standard line of action with fraudsters is to cut of all contact, say that you can't provide information, etc etc.
Obviously there is a lot of money involved, to Facebook should step up and talk to the guy, but the cold treatment doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
What's difficult here is as an outsider trying to determine the validity of the complaint.
Facebook is a public company. As such -- and even more so than traditional public companies -- it interacts with a lot of people. Many of these people are scammers, sure. (I have no idea about this person.) But there are also a lot of people who just get screwed over by the algorithms. All rules-based systems have false positives, and with the kind of numbers they deal with, there has to be a lot of people being identified as bad and kicked out that aren't.
So I understand your point about businesses. But most businesses that have a 160K dispute aren't peddling it on reddit and HN.
I think we can also agree that in many cases we've seen, people have been treated wrongly by these companies and only got it fixed after publishing things in forums like this.
So what the hell? Have HN and reddit become impromptu civil courts, where the "award" is having a real, live human look at somebody's records? I know I'm not qualified to have any kind of opinion, not with just one side of the story presented and not without the records. I would feel better about stories like this if they included some kind of conversation between the two parties. "And then I spoke with the manager on the phone...."
It's not just that they cut this guy off, and it's not just that so many things are automated. It's that for all intents and purposes, FB doesn't exist as a legal entity doing business. There's no office, there's no telephone number, they just don't interact with folks like this. It makes for a hell of a time trying to make heads or tails out of stories like this. (And I understand the philosophy of not giving out too much information to potential future fraudsters, but that doesn't make my complaint go away.)
Well, if we give this guy benefit of the doubt, he says he's from Ukraine. Suing a US-based company from Ukraine would be extremely difficult, and it would have to start with an expensive lawyer versed in international law. To be fair, if it was me, I would probably ask on HN first too, mostly because there's a good chance the situation would resolve itself that way,without me having to go and talk to lawyers.
There used to be a job called "consumer reporter" at most major media outlets. Their job was to take stories like this, do a little research, and try to present a somewhat balanced story for the rest of us to consume.
There also was a Better Business Bureau, which had a job to take all kinds of disputes like this and serve as a "memory" for the public.
As far as I know, these mostly-local institutions do not exist in analogue at web scale.
I think a mistake many people make in ongoing situations like these is contacting (and thereby deferring to) a companies 'support' channel. By asking them to reconsider, you almost subject yourself to their authority.
If you believe you have a legal dispute, you should write to them officially, cc your legal advisor if you have one. Given the sums involved I would personally take professional legal advice right now.
I read this sort of advice a lot here on HN and it always puzzles me. If I were to believe HN, the only way people ever do business in the US is through their lawyers. Or, at least, the moment there's some sort of misunderstanding or screwup there's always someone on HN who says "lawyer up!" and it's usually the top comment. Somehow, apparently, trying to sort things out the oldschool "hey we're both businesspeople, let's talk" way is considered a dangerous approach, and I don't understand why.
While I agree that this is probably the best approach for dealing with a company like Facebook that's notoriously difficult to get in touch with, shouldn't it really just be a "last resort" sort of thing? Why is it always recommended to start with legal threats? Isn't that the business version of "shoot first, ask questions later"?
I ask not just to criticize. My company is slowly starting to do dealings with American companies (small amounts, nothing like the stuff in this post) and if half our business communication is going to be in legalese we have some serious preparation to do.
My question was more general. Immediately after the line you quoted, I agreed that for such a powerful and closed company like Facebook it might be the only option, because your last resort is your only option.
No. You are peers. Both are businesses doing business. They have a business relationship.
> They literally won't even talk to you.
And exactly this is, why the system is broken. If you are the elephant in the room and you do not have to care for the flies even if there would be regulations protecting the flies then this is not a good situation.
This would be some kind of Feudalism. At least in practice.
To clarify: I know there exists rules and regulations. But if a big player like FB can just ignore them unless someone unleashes their lawyers, esp. if this other person is sitting half the globe away, then something is very, very broken and fucked up.
Being peers is often set as an axiom or a prerequisite when thinking about the theory of business transactions. However often in the reality it isn't the case. This is why you need antitrust laws, consumer protection laws, regulation, unions, etc.
The problem here is that there is a hole in the system. Not being paid or being paid late is very common for smaller contractors in several industries.
Unless you're Oracle, Google, Apple, or Microsoft, you are not a peer with Facebook.
"To clarify: I know there exists rules and regulations. But if a big player like FB can just ignore them unless someone unleashes their lawyers, esp. if this other person is sitting half the globe away, then something is very, very broken and fucked up."
You're not wrong, but how would you cause Facebook to care? And you can't really say government, because that would require government to be looking over every single transaction. Ignoring the privacy/freedom aspects, that would take a huge amount of manpower that the government just doesn't have and isn't willing to fund.
That’s the cost of doing business with large corporations. They’re faceless. My guess is that Facebook could have thousands of claims for any kind of imaginable dispute on any given day. How on earth could they provide support for that? That’s what a legal department is for. To reverse your argument, I don’t understand why so many developers are reluctant to speak to a lawyer. We don’t like speaking to lawyers, we don’t like speaking to marketers and salesmen, we don’t enjoy talking to accountants, and the list goes on. Well perhaps it’s time to man the fuck up and start acting like grownups. When there’s money involved consult someone with an expertise on the matter. Period.
I too don’t live in US. But I don’t think that’s US specific. It’s just that the sizes there are in most cases a lot bigger than everywhere else.
FWIW I agree. I live in the UK and don't think we have a particularly litigious culture but, and I mean no disrespect to facebook in saying this, you're on a hiding to nothing trying to deal with their support department. Nobody in there has any authority to make anything happen.
With $160k on the line (and, by the way, well done: with ~$80k monthly revenue you are living what many of us would consider to be the dream) you need to lawyer up. This isn't about taking facebook to court: it's about making your case to a group of people that can actually get something done for you (facebook's legal department) in a language that they understand.
America has a legal system made by lawyers for lawyers of lawyers.
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse..." is something said by a now dead and very naive man. When the "law" expands to something way beyond the ability of an average person to know and understand, you get carte blanche for abuse by both government and by corporations with legal teams.
In the Wild West, you bring a gun. In wild America, you bring a lawyer because all the other assholes are using them as weapons.
If there is more than 1000 USD/EUR involved you should get a lawyer to at least help you write the letters. That applies in most countries. You want to do that because: you want to be considered serious by the other party and not a joke, you don't want to miss deadlines, you don't want to give information to the other side that they can use against you, and you may trigger mistakes from the other side that then can be used against them in front of a judge, if it comes so far.
If someone owes you $160k you certainly want to get lawyers involved. There is no question. If your country has mafia instead of a law system, get the mafia involved. If you have a shaman get him involved. For that amount whoever can help you should get involved.
> If I were to believe HN, the only way people ever do business in the US is through their lawyers.
Your exposure is selective: you only get to hear about the cases where normal business has totally broken down (here, to the tune of six figures). This is true of most international news coverage, really...
The right lawyer. Lately, I've seen some lawyers work on Internet related matters, and basically just took customers' money.
I'm suprised ABA hasen't offered specialization certification--like in medicine.
I recently dated my brother's lawyer. Yes--it was a aweful. I went into it with an open mind. She talked about the lawyers in her office, and talked about the lawyers in her office, and talked about her law school, and of course had to tell everyone she was a Lawyer. At one point, in the evening someone asked me if I had legal trouble because of all the legal talk. I told him yea, as always, but this was just a bad date. At the end of the inquisition, she asked why I seemed tired. I actually told her the truth. She claimed if she was a guy, it wouldn't matter how much shop she talked, and I was insecure.
I just agreed. On the drive home, I asked her some basic chapter 7 bankruptcy questions, and got most wrong.
I then get a email from her office. Yea--kinda suprised. I thought "my judgement holder has my email address?". It was her, and she referred to herself as "That Lawyer you had dinner with?"
If a company stonewalls your apparently legal claim for remuneration of services or delivery of product then you should at the very least turn to a collection agency. This case will probably require a lawyer.
I am not sure what being American has to do with anything. I am not American either.
I didn't suggest that the OP uses lawyers to resolve everyday trivial disputes. I suggested that given the sums involved, reaching out to low-SLA support channels repeatedly was probably not a good strategy.
I don't attempt to diagnose medical conditions myself, there are people who can do it faster and more accurately. It is perfectly legitimate to reach out for help in areas that you are not familiar with. I am guessing that given this was posted to Reddit in the first instance, the OP is not someone who is familiar with legal issues of this kind.
In this case especially, or any case where you believe you are owed money but the situation is uncertain or there is complexity, it is exceptionally easy to put a foot wrong in a way that prejudices one's case later. For example, admitting knowledge of a T&C that gives the other party the sole discretion in certain kinds of dispute resolution is an example (e.g an "our determination is final" type clause). "Yeah, I saw that term, but surely you can't be serious?".
Lawyers know about these things, and can offer advice about how to proceed, and more importantly how not to proceed.
No one said anything about legal threats. However, these are contractual disputes. Contracts are legal documents. Therefore, it makes sense to have the people who would know the most about contracts, contract dispute resolutions, and contract law involved.
I totally agree than calling on lawyers should be a last resort. But the article says "I wrote them about twenty letters into every form or email I ever found." This is the last resort.
Unfortunately the financial issues caused by the withholding of the payment may put some publishers in a position where they simply can't afford legal help. If it's just a person that had an article or app go viral unexpectedly, and they never receive a payment, they may well not have the money or years required to take on a multi-billion dollar corporation. They'll be upset, but they'll just move on. Facebook and Google know this, which is why they do it to people all the time [1].
Pretty sure that's CTR. It's really not that hight considering we're talking about a mobile app. People tend to tap at ads when they're trying to do something else, and that often leads to insanely high CTRs.
Pretty sure this dude is paying someone to click on his ads and generate impressions so that the CTR is average.
80% CTR would be stupidly high, mobile app or not, anything over 5% would already be incredibly good.
The 80% figure is fill rate (AKA the percentage of impressions to requested placements), the 1.80-2.00% figure is the CTR, which matches the third column being impressions and fourth clicks.
It appears its Fill Rate. (Click Through rate is around 2%).
It appears to me that dev is involved in shady stuff (The fact that dev posted this in several forums without ever posting link to his app should be noted).
The spike in ad clicks (or some other metric) probably triggered an automated fraud detection system. Apparently FB sent him a separate email that contains the details (see the email's top paragraph).
Also, the email from FB has simple grammar errors and typos. I would expect a company of FB's size to have QA for this type of automated content. So, it leaves some doubt in my mind that the email wasn't edited before he posted to Reddit.
It's not 'stealing' if there's a violation in a contract (terms of service) and a payment is withheld. He could get a lawyer at this point. Or, maybe there is an arbitration clause in the contract. Who knows. But, there are legal remedies to these types of disputes. The dude should calm down, stop posting to the internet, be professional about it, and search for legit legal advice.
I feel like something must be wrong here. It's in Facebook's best interest to keep high performing publishers because thats how they make their money. I don't think they would try to harm that relationship just to prevent paying out publishers because they would just bounce and use a different network.
Google, through its Adsense program, has turned this kind of behavior into an art form [1]. Facebook must have decided that their legal team is now strong enough to perform the same scam without legal consequences. The elements of the scam are essentially the same between the two:
1) Pay on a net-30 basis, so that in most cases publishers send two months of traffic before they are paid;
2) Wait until the last minute before a payday to claim a policy violation so that the maximum amount of traffic that the network will refuse to pay for is sent; and
3) Make the description of the policy violation so vague that a successful lawsuit is nearly impossible without significant pre-trial discovery efforts, which will be aggressively fought by the phalanx of attorneys employed by the ad network.
What should be even more concerning to publishers in Google's case is the new "Valuable Inventory" policy [2]. In a nutshell, this essentially says that Google is the sole judge of whether or not your content is good enough to display ads against. If they decide at any time that it isn't, you will be banned and your earnings will be withheld. They've also implemented a policy forbidding ad placement that pushes down the site's content - an impossibility on mobile devices. The aim of all of this is to make all publishers technically in violation of one or more policies, which gives them unilateral discretion as to which publishers they choose to pay.
It's sad, but not altogether surprising, that Google and Facebook are acting in the same underhanded way in the operation of their ad networks. The only way to avoid this kind of behavior is to use lower tier ad networks, which sadly produce lower RPM.
I worked for online advertising platform for a while and I must say it's difficult here to decide who to trust. In case of Google I would way G, but with Facebook... who knows.
It is simply incredible what scammers do to get the money from advertisers (except delivering any value, that is) and what lengths they will go to to get "their" money. Of course G and FB can't reveal their countermeasures, so we must trust them blindly... But I believe Google has no problem distinguishing between legitimate ad shows/clicks (not that I approve of this invasion of privacy, but that's the way it is).
I do understand the risk publishers are taking (it might be someone else making fraudulent clicks which could get them banned), but I don't think there is a better way.
If they indeed can distinguish between those then they surely are frauding publishers out of money. As they use the fraudulent clicks story a lot: if they can recognize them, why ban the publishers and not just remove those clicks/views? Makes no sense. It is just a perverse incentive and powerplay (after all these years there is no competition).
So if they are refusing to pay the publishers are they refunding the advertisers for clicks? If they are doing that then they can argue that they are doing their best.
Because they must not allow publishers to try guessing which methods might be able to escape the scrunity of G. If they can recognize 99.997% of fraudulent clicks and fail at 0.003%, you can be sure that those 0.003 will soon balloon to 10% if publishers are allowed to experiment unchecked.
But yes, it is a powerplay. They can afford this, so they do.
But it might not be the publishers: it can and often are competitors. It is quite normal that people, from all walks of life, ask me if I search for their company in Google, to click on competitors' adwords. If the small entrepreneur thinks like that then it is not a stretch (and I know companies who did just that) to think many are actually hiring people and bots to click on adwords and adsense of competitors.
" if they can recognize them, why ban the publishers and not just remove those clicks/views? Makes no sense."
Not banning them is the move that doesn't make sense. You have someone who is purposefully trying to subvert the rules. Why oh why would you allow them to continue?
Because the publisher might not be at fault: it is a good way to get a competitor out of business and that has happened. Have a botnet click on your competitor, he gets banned and loses income? How does that make sense?
And have to mention Google can use this to ban anyone without any justification otherwise. Which was the topic.
Even with the best intentions and technology they will inevitably make mistakes. Unless they have a resolution process of any kind (and it seems they don't) they are crushing innocent people.
Yes! Please read this as this is not FUD; people just tend to believe big corps like G and FB but yes, I (and I have seen this with many of my friends over the years) have missed $10000s of revenues because of this with Google. Vague reasons and policies right before payday, no one to talk or raise a dispute to. Canned responses and a closes door after. Luckily we survived. Unfortunenately it was not the last time; stupid of me right? It seems that is how Google makes a lot of money. And no, not bitter: I learnt to dislike ads for many different reasons because of it, also I learnt how to never treat my customers like that. No recourse, just screw you and thanks for the free money. I still would like an explanation from Google but as that will never happen... So indeed: I hope ads are dying. Facebook will be helping it along doing this.
Edit; this is offtopic somewhat as this particular app might have been in violation. Just the blind believe that G&FB do not abuse their perverse interests (as in: there are more publishers than advertisers, many more) here seems weird. And for me, as far as I know, not true either.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Or at least some evidence. Any evidence. And no, possibility does not count as evidence.so,do you have any evidence for your extraordinary claims?
First, it's happened to me personally with $40k, and a friend of mine with $200k. Neither of us were sending them any invalid traffic. They seem to choose the publishers to whom they do this almost at random; another friend of mine makes over $100k/mo with them and has had no issues.
Second, both the Business Insider article I linked to and a simple Google search for "Adsense lawsuit" will turn up scores of people that have gone through precisely the same experience. This isn't an isolated incident, it's simply the way they do business.
This doesn't seem extraordinary. I commented the OP should provide more, and I was skeptical, but it doesn't seem extraordinary. In fact, given OPs post and the parent(and numerous others) anecdotes; it seems quite ordinary and logical.
I know this developer's app because I compete in a similar space. His app is actually quite illegal and also violates copyright laws and Google Play policies.
Facebook was correct in withholding payment to him. As far as I'm concerned, AdMob should be withholding payment to him too.
If anyone from Google wants me to describe the very illegal techniques being used by this app, please email me with a (@google.com) at finokioto@gmail.com . I would prefer not to share what this developer is doing in a public forum because of copycats.
this might seem silly or off topic, but one of the many things I love about HN is that the mods (I assume) rename thread titles to be a little clearer and less cryptic.
This morning the title of this post was "Facebook stole my $160000 For those who use Facebook ads in their Android apps" - incorrect grammar, and stripped punctuation made this a pain to process in my sleep-deprived brain. I'm delighted to see it's now much clearer. Thank you, mods!
On the other hand, some of the mods' title changes significantly reduce the information content, as for example the title that was changed for that other thread today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12690853
Originally that title was something like "Microsoft SQL Server 2016 in Docker", which gave some helpful context. But they replaced that with: "Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Express", a change that was not helpful at all, since it sounds like a product announcement of SQL Server 2016 now.
I know this developer's app because I compete in a similar space. His app violates copyright laws and a bunch of other Google Play policies.
Facebook was correct in withholding payment to him. As far as I'm concerned, AdMob should be withholding payment to him too.
If anyone from Google wants me to describe the very illegal techniques being used by this app, please email me with a (@google.com) at finokioto@gmail.com . I would prefer not to share what this developer is doing in a public forum because of copycats.
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