How exactly did they get access to the Facebook Ad Library API? You need special permission for that: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/api/" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/api/</a><p>Also, per those docs, ad spend is a range; I'm not sure how the article infers exact values.
This is awesome. There's a vast amount of data being made available, and it's great that people are making that data more accessible through visualizations and pattern detection.<p>There's a site that does a similar kind of analysis and offers regular updates to their reports: <a href="https://www.adspend2020.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.adspend2020.com/</a>
I'd like to see something similar on for YouTube and Twitter for the recent Hong Kong protests, I'm seeing lots of clearly political adverts on both platforms labeling protestors as "Black Terror" and the such.<p><a href="https://i.redd.it/00nqhz8ufnf31.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.redd.it/00nqhz8ufnf31.jpg</a>
Gender and age are interesting. But elections are won or lost based on ad copy targeted at interest groups... neither appear to be available in this analysis(?)
Interestingly enough, it might be on purpose the Democrats are not targeting old white men. There could be something to be said that if the 60 year old football loving men of the world get bombarded with Elizabeth Warren ads they will turn out to vote AGAINST her when they otherwise would've stayed home.
This is an interesting article show casing what kind of data is available through the API. There are many graphs, lots of data. But, little insight from my perspective. Democrats are rather targeting women and younger demographics than Republicans. Oh well...
since when do you have to pay to read Medium posts? We have our clients use it for 'blog' content for ease and SEO, but wouldn't advise if the articles can't be read for free...
But there is no input from the campaigns about how they choose their spending. I might guess they do their a/b testing and keep the ads that engage users more. this might be indicative of each candidate's audience. Assuming that this is true Sanders seems to be having the widest reach, judging from how close m/f ratio is to 50%
This is great data, but missing one crucial piece: how much reach did each candidate achieve given their spend? Both what they directly paid for with the ads, and then what the ads achieved organically beyond the spend.<p>My suspicion is that Trump, by being outrageous, realizes far cheaper effective ad rates (i.e. when you factor in both paid & organic reach) than any other candidate.
This is super cool! I'd be really curious to see how the messaging to particular demographics compares as well. Wild that the Trump campaign is spending so much money...
i don’t have a facebook account so i get a warning at the top: “By clicking or navigating the site, you agree to allow our collection of information on and off Facebook through cookies”<p>this is so against gdpr it’s crazy.<p>facebook, what the hell?
Clinton didn’t spend anything on Facebook? The data is also a little screwed considering that it was Trump and Hillary in the General election. All of the other candidates were just in the primary. Ad spending will heavily increase for a candidate in the General election.