How has the work with Facebook accounts changed over the past year? And will the possible refusal to transfer browser cookies affect future work? We are discussing the advertising account market with the founder of service dont.farm. In the interview, we will discuss how European accounts differ from Asian ones, why accounts in the service are so expensive (and who buys accounts for $2500?), what are the forecasts for working with Facebook for the next year, and much more!
We promise it's going to be really interesting! Let's go.
Hi! I guess, each webmaster who works with Facebook has heard about your service. So, it would be much more interesting to listen to your story about what you did before launching it and when you came up with the idea of the dont.farm project.
Hi! I came to dont.farm even before the name of the project appeared, but they already had operating MVP with their first customers. Before that, I managed buying in a well-known affiliate network and worked both independently and in different teams.
We all understand perfectly well that the most interesting question from the audience is why you've got so expensive accounts. Let's take it first then.
We’ve experimented with various business models, discounts, and promotions almost from the very beginning of the project. I think that we would have at least three times as many customers with half the cost. Still, we couldn't do this and this is why:
First of all, the most popular GEOs are still being completely bought out even today. Would you lower the cost with demand exceeding supply? I don’t think so.
Secondly, we're pretty sensitive about the preparation and sorting of accounts. Accounts are prepared exclusively manually and less than 5% of the total pool is used for sale. These measures allow us to smooth out the impact of Facebook updates.
Third, the prime cost of the product is much higher than people usually assume in chat rooms. For example, SoFarm that has been famous for more than 3 years, takes $250 monthly only for the technical fit-out, while the account itself is paid separately and costs even more. RunAds is another example. It's a project from a big holding that was copied from us. Their solution costs several times as much.
Fourth, we have always tried to focus on teams. The discounts that we provide on the volume are more than 30%, and this doesn't include substitutions.
Also, don't forget that there is development, accounting, marketing, and so on. Today, almost 80 people are working on the project, 25 of them are full-time in the office.
Another no less burning question - can you steal combinations from users?
We can, from a technical point of view, of course. There are a lot of hot comments with various content about our project but I guess you'll find none about stealing someone's combination. Cause, I think, it's completely useless. It's just a dead end. It’s a dead end cause at least 95% of what is tested, downloaded, and tried is of no value. To find something worthy in those many accounts we have is a real big deal. It makes no sense as even if you see what campaign is successful, it is extremely difficult to understand what exactly makes it successful. Any serious team has a lot of unique conditions with advertisers, and combinations, of course, are concluded. So if some combination is profitable for the webmaster or the team, it may not be possible to understand why. I'm not even talking about making money from it. Besides, the reputational risks associated with this venture would definitely cost more than the potential profit. Therefore, the way to create your own independent team of webmasters seems even more clear and interesting task.
What was the most expensive account in the service so far? We've heard about the price tag of $1000+ - What are those accounts and what is the maximum spend your customers had?
The most expensive accounts are sold to one team from the Emirates for $2500 for their unique purposes. Also, there are Enterprise Accounts in the stock. Their price starts just from $1000. It is clear that the most expensive account doesn't mean the account with the highest spend, and this statement is probably true for any Facebook accounts from any seller. It is obvious that you can get millions on google.com even from an automatically registered account, they ban not for this, it would be right to divide it into verticals and look at it on a larger sample group.
Enterprise Accounts have full access to the Facebook account and the ability to pass any checks. The minimum criteria for such accounts are 2 unlimited Business Managers with 5 advertising cabinets in each. Business Managers are verified. They necessarily have warmed-up campaigns and a warmed-up fan page, the payment system, of course, and some less considerable goodies. We created these accounts under a request from dropshippers.
You recently introduced a subscription model. If to recalculate the average expense of accounts in gray verticals, you see the price of accounts in the service has fallen from $99 per account to $2-5. What makes such a difference possible?
We have introduced the minimum number of accounts available for purchase together with the subscription, in such a way limiting entry by a price tag of $1290 and focusing the model primarily on teams. Fortunately, even not the most highly performing teams change accounts not more than three times for the subscription period. It's undoubtedly less profitable to us in comparison with the regular sale of accounts, even net of discounts and substitutions that have already taken place. But it allows us to share problems with webmasters when Facebook once again goes crazy and in such a way to reduce risks of common mistakes. As a rule, subscriptions are getting prolonged for the second or third month with a sharp increase in the number of slots and the consumption of accounts drops rapidly. I guess clients manage to adapt to the solution and get the maximum profit. Finally, no one would want to change the account that works. A subscription is a kind of guarantee of uninterrupted operation. And, as I said, the demand for account GEOs varies greatly. The subscription allows us to even it out, proving in practice that, for example, the Indonesian account is almost as good as the European one.
If to ask about your service in chatrooms, it is 95% likely to be a lot of hate. What is the reason for this?
I'd like to ask how you calculated this but I understand that it's not the question. Of course, we pay attention to feedback, and it strongly encourages us to develop. For those who saw the project at the start and sees it now, it will be difficult to deny the work done and a radical increase in the stability of the service. Still, there is undoubtedly more to do. But if you go deeper and think about what this opinion is based on, you can notice something interesting. First of all, it is worth dividing into those who tested the service and left dissatisfied or for some reason decided that our product is not worthy even of the test. As for the first, I guess the money earned would be the main criterion for a positive test for the client. In our sphere of work, 5% of the participants have 95% of earnings, and no matter how sad it is to admit it, but 19 out of 20 participants of almost any thematic conferences, chats and forums have far from enviable earnings, for many of them a failed test of $100 can be very painful. Sometimes a client leaves because of our failures. We always spend a lot of money and time to solve such issues, and they are not 95% for sure. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be talking to you here. The opinion of those who have not even tested, I think, is primarily provoked by the aggressiveness of our marketing, as well as pricing policy.
Who is your audience? Do you consider stores of automatically registered accounts, business managers, and sellers of logs your competitors?
The automatically registered accounts and logs, in my opinion, are used by inertia. To beat them and to make logs economically unprofitable for Facebook is a clear task. The stores of Business Managers are a more interesting solution. Although, even here there are some signs of a crackdown I think such a solution would live a long life, especially if we're speaking about manual farming of such business managers.
From the point of view of competition, of course, the success of such shops affects us but slightly. Nevertheless, we have many fundamental differences and advantages. Stores of business managers can be an excellent solution for cheap tests of many hypotheses, and we, in our turn, strive to offer an infrastructure for scaling.
What has changed in the Facebook ad account market this year? The accounts have less to live, it becomes more difficult to start, the checkpoints have become more frequent...
When I just started getting closer to the topic of traffic in 2015, I came across some threads from 2012 where webmasters resented the “crackdown” of that time. This process has become permanent but we should take it easier now. It is obvious, that it the most difficult time to start working with traffic but at the same time it's not going to become easier someday.
That's for sure. Nevertheless, the period of 2019-2020 was quite dynamic, what can you note among the changes?
From the very beginning of the project, we haven't flatter ourselves with hopes of being smarter than corporations from Palo Alto. Actually, the only thing you need is just to be better than other sellers. That reminds me of an anecdote:
Two hunters met a huge bear in the forest. One of them gets down on his knees and starts praying, while another starts fastening his shoelaces tighter. One asks the other: -What are you doing? You can't outrun a bear! - But I don't need to outrun it, I just need to outrun you.
We need to understand that any difficulties with driving traffic that webmasters get mean the growth of the client base for us, so we welcome them. We can note quite the logical development of Facebook in the direction of limiting advertising activities for new accounts. These measures almost don't affect the white advertisers but greatly reduce the profitability for webmasters.
- Limits are getting lower. I believe that in the near future we will forget about accounts with a limit of less than $50 at the start;
- Bans when creating Business Managers and advertising campaigns. The appeal of accounts becomes almost mandatory procedure for driving traffic from accounts;
- Limitation of the number of Business Managers and advertising campaigns. A year ago, we regularly created 10 Business Managers with 5 accounts in each of them almost from any social network. Recently, we saw an unprecedented limit of 3 accounts in the Business Manager, and there will be more of these accounts in the future.
The struggle for the security of users' personal data on the Internet is sharpening every day, and browsers are moving towards refusing to transfer Cookies. Can this affect the market of accounts, especially those that are “rented”?
I don't think there will be any great changes. Don’t forget that 99% of people still use the browser, cookies, and any mass technologies for their intended purposes. It is already terrifying to imagine, for example, that you will always have to enter a login pass every time you try to log in to each service, so the developers are very limited in possible restrictions for users, sorry for the tautology. The only sure way is to try to make this idea economically unprofitable but I don't think Facebook has such a goal. If they wanted to completely protect Facebook from webmasters, their decision wouldn't be related to cookies in any way.
You run hundreds of accounts every day, and of course, you follow what is happening in the market - what advice can you give on working with accounts?
Working with accounts is one of the small cells of working with traffic in general. I would recommend everyone to grow development and technology and not get infected with the myths about traffic.
What do you mean by development and technology? Own services?
If driving traffic is a production line, then development and technology are robots, and webmasters are operators. We see that as the launches become more complex, it is the tech teams that come out on top, as well as they will be the only ones to survive in the future. Only they will be able to provide the launch cost, which will be economically justified by earnings from the account. I believe that 3 types of services and solutions will be useful:
- Analytics Services;
- Services that reduce startup costs;
- Services that increase the life of the account and profitability from it.
Does the account's GEO affect the account's trust? Do the European accounts differ from Tier-3 Asian accounts?
Of course, they do from the point of view of the comfort of work. Using an account in Thai is not something we dreamed of as a child. It is not always easy to find adequate proxies for the countries that were connected to the Internet just yesterday. Account's GEO doesn't provide any fundamental difference from the point of view of spend.
What do you think about the market of automatically registered accounts and Business Managers? Perhaps it's time to expand the range? After all, services that work on the automated drive are entering the market, allowing you to take Facebook by the number of launches, not by the quality.
dont.farm is not the only public project to launch Facebook ads that we have today.
What is the current situation with Business Manager verification? How difficult is it? What goodies does it provide? In which cases does it make sense (when working with which verticals)?
Accounts can be verified in two different ways:
- You can publish some documents and try to look like a white office, there are a lot of manuals in the public.
- You can use one of the Facebook trusted companies.
The first method is long and chaotic, so we use the second one to verify our accounts. The main difference between the verified accounts is the logic of moderation. Based on the data we have, there is reason to believe that ads are moderated mostly manually, if not completely. Accordingly, for especially black verticals, it may be possible to extend the life of the account multiple times due to a large load of verifiers, but it will still remain insignificant since the account will be banned at the first visit of the moderator. But, surprisingly, the dropshippers' audience is more interested in this option.
What are your plans for the next year?
To please the community with new features.
What can you wish our audience?
The audience seems to be mostly independent and doesn't need any wishes. I think it's better to offer a 30% discount on the subscription test for the first month in July. Promotional Code: “IHater”.
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