Hey guys. I'm new to STM but a veteran internet marketer with about 2 yrs experience running ads on fb.
I am thinking about writing a mobile ad scraper for fb ads and I wanted to put a feeler out there to see how many people would be interested in something like that. I write code, so it would only take me about 1-2 weeks to write, however, maintenance will not be easy. So please let me know if you're interested and what you would pay for a service like this.
The final product would let you search demographics and see the most popular ads for those demographics. Eventually I will get a master list of all affiliate urls so that my service can scrape the landers, allowing users to see landers for specific offers and duplicate ads from the same user will be able to be intelligently sorted.
I was thinking of charging between $500-$1000 for this.
If anyone is interested please let me know and let me know what you would pay for something like this. All feedback is welcome!
There's been quite a few attempts at this and in the end there are a myriad of problems to deal with and you're likely grossly underestimating the difficulties here.
1-2 weeks isn't a practical target when you have to deal with:
- getting a broad array of accounts,
- stategising where to demographically position them,
- keeping those accounts live,
- viewing mobile-targeted ads properly which may only serve through the app (not sure of how m.facebook.com fits in),
- plan out bot behaviour and be mindful of how that is going to a) make fakeness obvious and b) compartmentalise you into different oCPM segments, potentially making you invisible to advertisers bidding on another segment.
Those are just my initial thoughts. It's not something you can simply code around. Remember, with the amount of revenue FB does, fraudulent and ToS-breaking advertisers as well as accounts with purposes like those needed here, cost their ecosystem millions - so they will be actively making anything like this difficult.
There are quite a few services up now and I believe they've all taken many months of development, and are still no way near the level of platforms like WhatRunsWhere in the context of display/search ads.
Thanks for the info. The coding part is easy for me and I already know how I'm getting around most of your bullet points. I would be just targeting the US at first. I don't want to give anything away, but most of your concerns have already been thought of. There will be no bots or fake accounts. It will only run on people's accounts that agree to have their ads spied on. Getting the people will take more than 1-2 weeks obviously, however, all I care about is the time it takes for me to code this and maintain it. I will check out whatrunswhere now... does it do facebook mobile ads?
I don't believe WRW does.
How will you get much coverage if it's only real users who give a low number of impressions? And how will you deal with demographically classing them since their interest will vary a lot and dictate their ad exposure?
Indeed this kind of spying will be much easier if your conduit is real users. But then, there's that issue... how will you convince users to basically allow spyware on their device for you to scrape ads, which will also use their resources/bandwidth and could potentially be capturing their private and sensitive information? Seems like something anti-malware software will have a field day with.
@thewaynejones - Any progress on this?