Facebook is becoming less and less attractive to young people below 30 now, plaguing Facebook over the past decade. In 2012, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion. One of its purposes is to firmly lock young people in their huge empire. However, internal documents show that even Instagram, which has always been sought after by young people, has a feeble growth in important markets such as the United States. In the face of this situation, Facebook's solution is to encourage users to open more accounts, which has been causing technical, reputation, and legal trouble.
Frances Haugen, a former employee of the company, mentioned in a document disclosed to regulators and Congress that the inclusion of duplicate accounts in Facebook's user count not only masks the fact that users are decreasing, but also means that some advertisers in some cases were charged by the company twice. A study in the Year 2018 showed that according to Facebook's estimation, for nearly 20% of the advertising companies, if they eliminate those duplicate accounts, their audience will be reduced by more than 10%.
The reduced reliability of Facebook statistics has led many marketers to start putting pressure on the company, requiring the company to open its platform to third-party verification.
Melinda Byerley, the founder of Fiddlehead, a digital marketing consultancy, said: "At least in terms of finance, we have auditors who can guarantee the authenticity of the numbers. If there is no third party to supervise the authenticity of Facebook's data, this is very frightening."
Facebook said that they had a total of 2.9 billion monthly live users worldwide in the past quarter, with the number of users increasing by 7% year-on-year. However, in these active accounts, the company did not exclude those duplicate accounts. They will only provide these figures in the annual regulatory documents. In 2020, the company estimated that 11% of its monthly active users were duplicate accounts.
In the Year 2021, an internal study of 5000 new users was conducted. The results show that almost 40% to 60% of new accounts in the United States are created by users who already have a Facebook account, which is too large for a platform originally designed to represent a person's real online identity. The study also shows that Facebook may even underestimate the actual scale of the duplicate accounts.
Another research report found that people aged 18 to 30 in the United States now register more accounts on the app than the actual number of people in the population group. Researchers believe that this problem has already reached a point where it cannot be ignored. The study added that this oversaturation may have a chain reaction to other relevant indicators, making them less reliable.
Meanwhile, in California, Facebook is dealing with a group lawsuit accusing the company of deliberately exaggerating the scale of its potential audience to marketers and counting duplicate accounts, but the company did not disclose the fact to "maintain its bottom line". And yet previously, in the Year 2016, Facebook paid a settlement of $40 million to some marketers and admitted that they had miscalculated the average viewing time of some video advertisements. The plaintiffs in the case said that the average viewing time of video ads was exaggerated by up to 900% in some cases.
As we all know, the advertisements we launch on Facebook are charged by CPM. In other words, the fee of the advertisement paid to Facebook is calculated according to how many people the advertisement was displayed to. Given the problem of the duplicate account above, we have every reason to believe that our advertising expenses are now being wasted. For example, party A has three different accounts, and the same advertisement is shown to these three accounts individually. In the view of the Facebook system, they are independent audience individuals, but in fact, behind them is the same person.
In the face of the privacy policy of Apple's iOS14, Facebook's effective marketing is being questioned. Bogged down in a crisis, troubles coming one after another, and the problem of duplicate accounts have been exposed again. We'll wait and see what kind of response this social magnate can make.