This 'Breakup Letter' Describing What It's Like To Advertise On Facebook Is Brutal And Hilarious

Eat24, the food delivery company, will delete its Facebook page at 11.59 p.m., according to this hilarious "breakup letter" it has written to Facebook.

The blog post, while tongue in cheek, actually delivers a brutal analysis of how difficult it has become for some advertisers on Facebook. "You lied to us," it says at one point. "It really seems like you've lost your way and have become nothing more than an ad platform."

The letter was triggered by Facebook's most recent change to its news Feed algorithm, which prioritizes actual news - and posts that lots of your friends have engaged with - over a mere chronological display of other people's posts. For advertisers, that has meant that most of their posts go unseen - buried under an average of 1,500 posts that most users get per day.

The only way to guarantee everyone who follows a company will see any given post is for a post to go massively viral on its own, or for the company to pay to promote its posts. That, for many advertisers, is infuriating: They believe people liked their pages in order to get their messages, and now they can't get their messages unless the company pays. Eat24 says:

If that's true, that means your algorithm is saying most of our friends don't care about sushi porn, that they aren't interested in hearing our deepest thoughts about pizza toppings. Are you listening to yourself? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? You know that all those people clicked 'Like' on our page because it's full of provocatively posed burritos and cheese puns, right?

The company even accuses Facebook of being more like an ad platform than a social network:

You lied to us and said you were a social network but you're totally not a social network.

It makes us think all you care about is money. Why should we have to wade through a dozen promoted posts about how to lose belly fat (are you trying to tell us something?) and requests for Candy Crush (NO! Just no.) and suggesting we like our arch nemesis' page (seriously, WTF) before we can finally find the perfect Doge meme, It really seems like you've lost your way and have become nothing more than an ad platform.

But perhaps the issue that Facebook is most sensitive to is whether advertising generates fake Facebook likes. Eat24 goes there, too:

And it's true, we got a ton of new likes on our page. Look at all these new friends, we thought. There's a guy in Houston, and this guy in… Bangladesh? And this girl in… Dubai? WTF Facebook!?

Facebook spokesperson Brandon McCormick took it on the chin:

Hey Eat24, this is Brandon over at Facebook. I was bummed to read your letter. The world is so much more complicated than when we first met - it has changed. And we used to love your jokes about tacquitos and 420 but now they don't seem so funny. There is some serious stuff happening in the world and one of my best friends just had a baby and another one just took the best photo of his homemade cupcakes and what we have come to realize is people care about those things more than sushi porn (but if we are in the mood for it, we know where to find it Eat24!). So we are sorry that we have to part this way because we think we could still be friends - really we do. But we totally respect you if you need some space.

You can read the whole Eat24 letter here >