Analyst reported out that Facebook is saying it can reach people who don't exist.

In fact, by ten million.

They're inflating these numbers of people that they say exist that this analyst says don't exist.

Explain what's happening here.

Ok, so on one hand we're talking about the estimated reach of a Facebook ad.

On the other hand, we're talking about the numbers that are in the US census.

So Facebook says it can reach more people that are in the US census.

Of course that implies that... in Facebook, which is a place where we have real names,

we have identities, Facebook sells its advertising based on that.

There might be some fake names, fake identities or duplicate accounts or whatever it might be.

What Facebook says in response is that they don't mean to totally match the census.

In fact, in a lot of geographic regions,

there are often visitors or people who are in a place that are not actual residents of that place.

And that the advertisers only pay for the people that they reach.

So, this analyst report is coming from Brian Wieser of Pivotal.

And I'm curious... He's saying there's like a ten million dollar, ten million person difference.

I mean, do these other kinds of people that Facebook is talking about... Can they really be ten million of them?

Ten million tourists in America?

Yeah, I think that what this comes back to is this debate we've had for more than a year now

about how much we can really trust metrics on digital properties.

And Facebook had a little bit of controversy last year

when it said that they inflated some metrics it was giving advertisers.

They fixed those problems.

They weren't related to billing,

but it did cause a ripple effect in the advertising industry

where people were thinking...

We don't really know if all of the people that Facebook says we're reaching

are actually people or if they're fake accounts,

or if they are actually looking at these ads,

or if it's click fraud.

In that case, it would be like a bot clicking on the ad which is not actually human.

So they've been trying to fix their system,

they've been trying to work with third-party verifiers,

to make sure that these numbers are legit.

Meanwhile, this report from Wieser at Pivotal Research

gives more fodder to this argument from advertisers that they need more transparency from Facebook.