Facebook: The company’s report yesterday was amusing

Facebook: Incompetence Or?

Facebook Inc. (FB), the biggest social networking site, surged in German trading after reporting sales that topped analysts’ estimates, allaying concerns over its ability to make money from mobile ads.

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Ads delivered to people on mobile devices generated about $150 million during the quarter, or 14 percent of all advertising revenue. That compares with about $10 million in the second quarter, according to an estimate by Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is showing early success with the more than a half dozen services unveiled since March that are designed to help businesses woo social-network users on tablets and smartphones.

I find this amusing; how many of these “analysts” have actually used Facebook on a mobile device?  If they had their first question would be “how many of those clicks are intentional?”

Why?  Becasue what Facebook has done is stuffed them in the middle of the timeline on a mobile device but just under the first page, so as you scroll down with your finger they appear.  Drop your finger at the wrong time (“chatter” it while scrolling) and voila! — a click happens.

The question isn’t whether you can get tricky like this, it’s whether these “clicks” turn into conversions (sales); if not the advertisers won’t be spending money for very long.

I’ve accidentally clicked a few times this way, but I’ve never intentionally clicked one of these ads.  One wonders if the placement is designed to lead to this sort of result.  Naw…..

More-amusing is that there’s a problem with how Facebook is playing with Akamai; they apparently shifted some content delivery and didn’t bother to fix their SSL certificate in the process.  If you’re this “off the ball” in today’s cyberworld….

Incidentally, this will result in the disappearance of “Like” buttons around the Internet, and in a few browsers (Safari being one) it will throw warnings.  Firefox will (by default) silently drop the like button, IE will complain along the bottom, and Safari pops up the bottom of the below two boxes (and if you click “Show certificate” you can then see what’s going on — there’s a domain name mismatch in what they set up.  Oops.)

Disclosure: This is the best opportunity to buy PUTs I’ve seen on this name in a long time.