Dear Mr. Gravel,

Why are all the Facebook ads all about losers who figured out how to make thousands of dollars a month by working from home?

Thanks,

iwannworkfromhometoo


Hi Iwannaworkfromhometoo,

After I received your note, I checked my own facebook account to see what you mean. I cropped a screenshot of my page. Here it is:

Geez, there are a ton of ads about folks able to make lots of dough from the comfort of their own home!

I like the top ad "I got $11,668 in only a month", like this is some impossibility. If you make $150,000 at your day job for "the man", you would be bringing in $12,500 monthly. Of course, your ad might read, "I earn $12,500 each month, click here to earn your degree and work hard like I did...".

The bottom ad is a little weirder. "Learn how I make $1250 a week from my kitchen table in my underwear"????? I think the picture paired with that quote tells us everything you need to know. It might as well read, "Learn how to rake in dough with porn cams in your house!"

If you go to the advertise page with facebook, it tells you about how you can make your own ad with their utility and target it to just the right folks. So maybe iwannaworkfromhometoo and I have something in common: Facebook thinks that our facebook profiles suggest we both want badly to be lazy and while simultaneously pulling down Bejamins. So be it.

On facebook,  most of the ad placements are in a rightside column. At the bottom of the row of ads, you can click on 'more ads', and then you a big list. I really liked these two side by side:

I wonder if I should click on the $75/hour or $100/hour? I'd like to make more money per hour, but what if I have more responsibilities? And could that stack of money the dude is holding look more ill-gotten? Wrapped in rubber bands? Remember folks: If he's holding $10,000, working at $75/hour rate, he put in 133 hours for those bucks. Nothing comes easy, right?

With just a little research about these ads, there is one resounding theme: Don't send anyone your money, because you shouldn't have to pay your employer, but vise-versa. Wise words, indeed. These types of ads have been around forever in newspapers, and Facebook is just the most recent, hottest ad farm. So iwannaworkfromhometoo, why does Facebook have a bunch of work from home ads? Gawker.com has a nice idea about that here. But I'm certain that the ads are there because lots people submit them, and lots of people click on them. If you grow tired of them, just click the "thumbs down" icon under the ad. You can cite the reason for the thumbs down as "misleading" or "offensive". That's what I did, and now I make $500/hourly working from the comfort of my mom's basement!