It’s implicitly understood that the roughly $200 billion that people are anticipated to spend on digital adverts this 12 months within the US can be spent on various phony figures, puffed-up gross sales pitches, and numbers which are simply, nicely blatantly fake. It’s only a actuality within the business and nobody is immune. But a few of these numbers are going to be faker than others. Case in level: final week, Facebook quietly rolled out an update to the best way it counts customers on the platform, primarily saying it should begin counting folks’s Instagram and Facebook accounts as… two separate customers. The motive? To milk more cash from advertisers, after all!

Just to again up a bit, Facebook fees advertisers a specific amount based mostly on the efficiency of their specific Facebook advert. What “performance” means varies from advert to advert, however in a nutshell, advertisers plunk down a sure amount of cash (a “budget”) into Facebook’s advert programs and inform the corporate what they need finish customers to do once they see their advert—like clicking on the advert, or hitting the like button beneath it, for instance.

After 30 days of the advert working, Facebook tallies what number of customers clicked, appreciated, or downloaded the product being marketed, and it fees advertisers based mostly on the entire variety of customers that took that step. In different phrases, the extra customers work together with an advert the more cash that Facebook can cost—and generally, every of those interactions can run close to $6 a pop.

The method that Facebook used to measure every of those particular person customers made a variety of sense. According to Graham Mudd, Facebook’s VP of Product Marketing, the corporate would depend one person with, say, a separate Facebook and Instagram account as one person if the corporate believed that these accounts have been owned by a single particular person.

“For example, if someone used the same email address across their Facebook and Instagram accounts or accessed both platforms from the same device, we counted them as one person when they interacted with ads,” Mudd wrote. Again, makes a variety of sense! It’s additionally not what Facebook’s going to be doing anymore, in response to Mudd.

From right here on out, he wrote, “if someone does not have their Facebook and Instagram accounts linked in Accounts Center, we will consider those accounts as separate people for ads planning and measurement.” This change, he went on, will roll out “over the next few weeks.”

I’d by no means heard of Accounts Center earlier than studying this announcement, and there’s probability I’m not alone. This was a instrument that the corporate rolled out in September 2020 as a solution to voluntarily join their accounts throughout Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook correct. Connecting these accounts was absolutely non-compulsory, however as the corporate said at the time, it got here with a couple of perks: accounts may very well be recovered extra simply, for instance, or tales may very well be cross-posted on Facebook and Instagram concurrently. But except for that preliminary announcement, I haven’t seen the instrument talked about anyplace in my Instagram or Facebook apps, and neither have the oldsters at Indiehackers, who first covered Mudd’s announcement. An FAQ describing the instrument states that Accounts Center is “currently being tested” and “isn’t available to everyone” who has a Facebook or Instagram account.

Those folks, ostensibly, are going to have their Facebook and Insta accounts counted as two separate customers—even when the corporate clearly is aware of higher—till they do get entry to the instrument. When that can be, nicely… solely Facebook is aware of for certain. But the corporate has loads of motive to maintain in search of inventive methods to juice its numbers; a couple of weeks in the past, Mudd put out a separate weblog publish admitting that due to a number of the current pro-privacy adjustments launched by iOS, the corporate had been under-reporting a number of the clicks and app downloads customers have been making upon seeing their adverts.

This meant that Facebook wasn’t getting the advert price range minimize that Facebook rightfully felt that it deserved—and contemplating how the corporate earns close to 98% of its income off focused adverts, it’s not shocking that the corporate’s in search of some, um, “creative” methods to make again that distinction.