There Are 83 Million Fake Facebook Accounts

Water Cooler
#1

The news seems to be having a fun time with the Facebook quarterly filing…

http://www.businessinsider.com/there-are-83-million-facebook-accounts-2012-8

"4.8% are duplicate accounts where users have more than one account.

2.4% of accounts are misclassified accounts, where users either create personal accounts for companies, organizations, a pet, or other non-human being.

1.5% are “undesirable accounts.” Spamming accounts fall under this category. "

#2

Not on FB, don’t own shares, and don’t intend to sleep with MZ for a boatload of money, but doesn’t that still leave 800MM+ legitimate accounts?

#3

Yes, In the same filing, they mention 872 million non-fake accounts. However, the interesting part to me is that all the metrics that people are using to value Facebook seem to have some story behind them. Number of accounts must be adjusted for fake accounts, and what else? Ad clicks must be adjusted for bots. What about user growth estimates, or other numbers that people keep citing? Many of the adjustments will not be material, but they illustrate the complications with trying to value a new sort of company like this.

#4

I am not an avid Facebook user or follower but in their user agreement that they make everyone sign do they have a clause that essentially ‘allows’ them to disclose information to other companies? (Not personal info as in address and email but data on likes received, fav movies, food, clothing brand by region etc.)

(i.e. can Facebook ‘legally’ disclose to Coca Cola how many likes Coke received on Facebook vs Pepsi?)

#5

I’m not sure, but I would speculate that Facebook cannot say “here is a list of people who Like Coca Cola” and give that to Coca Cola company. However, they can probably keep an internal record of that list, show Coca Cola ads to people on that list, and give Coca Cola summarizing numbers on how many people saw the ads or Like Coca Cola.

This is just speculation. I suppose we would have to go through the user agreement to know for sure.

#6

Yea but what about competitors? Can Coke ‘buy’ from them info on Pepsi? I feel that would generate a LOT of revenue for them. More so then putting up ads everywhere on the page and potentially losing a lot of users. Having said that though, can a market research firm be valued at $100B? Who knows…