Twitter thread about social media advertising

October 12, 2017 6:53 AM

Several months ago--perhaps a year ago or longer, even--I remember a fascinating Twitter thread about the likely/probable worthlessness of advertising on Twitter. The author of this thread drew from previous experience in another industry where folks in (I think?) ad sales would typically artificially inflate their numbers in order to justify their own jobs. The thread posited Twitter ad "eyeballs" and "clickthroughs" as a possible house of cards and suggested ways of exposing this.

I am no longer on Twitter and no longer have access to my old faves or follows. If it helps in narrowing this down, I believe the author was either trans or nonbinary and identified as neurodivergent.

posted by duffell to Technology (7 answers total)

Hmm, I think I remember this. Was the author working in an office of salesmen, and tasked with collating data on sales, which ended up being massively lower than what was reported by the salesmen? Because the salesmen reported every phone call with a potential client as a "sale in progress" or a "potential sale" or something, whereas the actual "sales completed" value was like 1% of that number? And all the sales staff got really pissed off at the author for revealing the truth that their output was actually terrible.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 7:25 AM on October 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: YES! YES. That was the Thing, yes.
posted by duffell at 7:27 AM on October 12, 2017

I don't think it was a Twitter thread because I remember it being more fleshed out than a Twitter thread would allow. I think it was a full article. It's a hard thing to search for though because any mention of "sales" just brings back a million websites about sales.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 8:08 AM on October 12, 2017

I have vague memory of this being either a Metafilter comment or linked in a Metafilter post.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 8:29 AM on October 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Found it!
posted by sonmi at 9:01 AM on October 12, 2017 [6 favorites]

Response by poster: YAY! Thank you!
posted by duffell at 10:31 AM on October 12, 2017

Not that thread, but related content: Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure (part one) of three. Doesn't talk about scams or fraud, just the economic foundations of advertising and how they clash badly with social media sites, and how that turns into a death-spiral eventually.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:27 PM on October 12, 2017 [1 favorite]