Evidence Facebook's revenue is based on fake likes.My first vid on the problem with Facebook: http://bit.ly/1dXudqYI know first-hand that Facebook's advertising model is deeply flawed. When I paid to promote my page I gained 80,000 followers in developing countries who didn't care about Veritasium (but I wasn't aware of this at the time). They drove my reach and engagement numbers down, basically rendering the page useless. I am not the only one who has experienced this. Rory Cellan-Jones had the same luck with Virtual Bagel: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18819338The US Department of State spent $630,000 to acquire 2 million page likes and then realized only 2% were engaged. http://wapo.st/1glcyZoI thought I would demonstrate that the same thing is still happening now by creating Virtual Cat (http://www.facebook.com/MyVirtualCat). I was surprised to discover something worse - false likes are coming from everywhere, including Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. So even those carefully targeting their campaigns are likely being duped into spending real money on fake followers. Then when they try to reach their followers they have to pay again.And it's possible to be a victim of fake likes without even advertising. Pages that end up on Facebook's International Suggested Pages are also easy targets for click-farms seeking to diversify their likes. http://tnw.co/NsflrCThanks to Henry, Grey, and Nessy for feedback on earlier drafts of this video.
NOTE: This video will appear in a playlist on Smarter Every Day hence the references to Veritasium. Destin does lots of cool science stuff - check out his channel if you haven't already http://www.youtube.com/destinws2 We have been collaborating on rotational motion, which is timely for some of the videos I've been doing lately. In this video I talk about gyroscopic precession - the "wobbling" of a spinning top around its axis. This is caused by the torque due to the object's weight. The big idea is that the torque vector increases angular momentum in the direction of torque. So if there is no angular momentum initially, it will cause the system to swing in such a direction that it is rotating with new angular momentum in the direction of the torque. However, if there was angular momentum to begin with, the torque will change the direction of that angular momentum by causing precession.