I've seen quite a few of my friends (which includes women) as well as myself get the "hot gay men" and gaychannel.tv ads on Facebook.

I'm not exactly sure what type of targeting they're doing, but if they're using any of my profile information to determine what ads they're going to send me, I think their algorithm is whacked.

Repeat after me: on Facebook advertisers decide what keywords and demographics to target.

If you're seeing stupid ads it's because advertisers are, surprise surprise, stupid.

@alex3345: Oh! That explains it. You're right; Facebook has no responsibility for any of the ads displayed on their site; in fact, they have no control over their own pages either. If people unwittingly have giant mammaries or hot gay bods shoved in their face, it's their own fault. Or the advertisers. But not Facebook's. God no.

@ alex3345: oh mr bigshot above knows the inner workings of their ad matching technology.

So hot shot are you suggesting those "dumb" advertisers actually purposely targeted their ads to "aryan satan worshippers"? Right.

You must be an engineer, possibly working at facebook.

Facebook sucks, their ad model will fail, nobody will ever convert on any of those ads (see my space). Better stick to the branding dollars gang and pray your ad selection gets better.

Side note, I had heard a few years ago that the facebook team pretty much laughed all the ad serving companies out the door because they were building their own super sophisticated, super sweet ad serving architecture. Is this what they came up with? Outstanding!

Alex is exactly correct. It's a self serve ad market, so these type of targeting mistakes have nothing to do with Facebook's algorithm... the porn stuff is another story, but they can't be expected to catch every self serve ad before someone sees it - I just report anything I see if it feels inappropriate and move on...

Sheryl Sandberg has a tough job ahead of her. At least Facebook has finally realized their faulty algorithm, so hopefully we'll see some serious improvements in the coming months.

@hatebook - my Facebook ads have performed extremely well actually... not sure where you're getting your information - perhaps you only read Valleywag?

nicholas carlson: vodafone != orange. different companies, and even competitors. wikipedia much?

@alex3345: These advertisers are particularly stupid because no farcebook user buys anything!

Farcebook knows this so they put "shocking" pictures to make users look. Otherwise, user experiences are just "A/S/L?, ROLF, OMFG!, A/S/L, drinks tonight?, wheee!, click...."

dude, introduce me to bree?

Hey, Aryan Satan worshippers use a lot of phone minutes.

@sigh: She looks a lot like pre-nutbag Britney. And we all know where that went.

www.satan.facebook.com
www.gaydude.facebook.com

I second akagrae's comment. The ads convert great for me... It's the CTR that is low, not the conversion - and if you buy per click that's not an issue then. @hatebook: you don't have a clue.