Facebook is destroying my business. What can I do?

I am the co-founder of a small startup building dating apps for iOS/Android. We’ve launched 2 so far since we started working 2 years ago and they’re received very well, 1000+ 5 star ratings (overall 4.5 rating). Yes, I know, online dating isn’t the sexiest industry these days for hackers, but we think we can do a lot better than what the incumbents from a decade ago are currently offering, and our investors agree.

As you can probably imagine, a good advertising/marketing strategy is vital to any dating site’s success and is essential in the early days in order to establish a critical mass of users. Facebook is by far the most efficient platform for promoting a new dating app/site because of its traffic and its targeting capabilities (for example, where else can you effectively target 18-35 year old Christian female singles in suburban neighborhoods across the US?)

So, naturally, we started out advertising our apps on Facebook last year with great success. Traffic grew as users stuck around, and revenue grew with it – at our peak we were doing about $1,000 / day, about half of that as profit.

Then around January 2014 all of our ads were abruptly disapproved (after running successfully for over 8 months), with a message from Facebook that they are now only running ads for dating sites from “approved advertisers.” When asked what an approved advertiser was, they just told us it was a company with a prior established relationship with Facebook. We told them we had been advertising on Facebook since early 2010 and maintained a good relationship, but still we did not fall into the “approved advertiser” category.  We then asked how we could become approved advertisers, but they told us that they are currently not accepting applications.

I immediately thought that this was temporary – that Facebook was struggling to deal with an influx of dating site affiliate advertisers – ruthless gray hats who tend to carpet bomb the Internet with their affiliate links, vying for clicks any way they can – but after months went by I realized this was not the case. We also realized that there are lots of other smaller dating apps that this happened to.

We’ve reached out to every contact and every friend who works at Facebook, and have called Facebook’s ad team numerous times, only to receive the same boilerplate response we first got back in January. The ad reps agree that the policy is strange, but that’s all the info they have for me, and it’s all coming directly from the executives without further info. When I pressed further, they just told me they had received a lot of complaints about the quantity of dating ads on Facebook.

What’s particularly frustrating is that this whole time, and even today, we see ads on Facebook for our larger direct competitors (Zoosk, Match.com, etc), almost on every page view. I understand if Facebook wants to ensure a diversity of ads, but the fair way to do that would be to allocate, for example, a maximum of 10% of the site’s impressions to dating, and let the dating advertisers compete for that 10% slice. Don’t just give that 10% away to the large incumbents and shove everyone else off a cliff.

We’ve explored many other advertising channels, however the CPIs are always 3-6x higher as we can’t target our ads as effectively, and on top of that, we also run into volume problems.

So, here we are, hundreds of thousands of dollars in our bank account just waiting to be spent, but no way to do it. We’re watching our traffic and revenue slowly dwindle away while our direct competitors, who enjoy access to Facebook ads, continue to grow and prosper.

It would be fine if Facebook just banned all dating apps. That would level the playing field. But we can’t compete, no matter how great our features, no matter how well we treat our users, if our competitors can buy quality traffic at 50 cents per install, while we can only do it at $2 or above. We simply are asking for the opportunity to compete fairly, and spend our money on the same platform our competitors do. If we get outspent and can’t keep up, then at least we’ll have died a fair death. But we refuse to dwindle into the deadpool, years of hard work gone to waste, as a result of a strange Facebook policy.

Are there any attorneys in the HN community out there who can give us some guidance? Is there an antitrust claim here? If not, is there any legal pathway we could take? We’re not looking to get rich with a ridiculous settlement – we just want our ads enabled again. Thanks for any advice. If you’d like to get in touch, please email facebookdatingads@gmail.com