You might reasonably imagine that setting something up like Ads with Meta (Facebook & Instagram) — you know, a company of such galactic proportions it probably has more developers than I have socks, and whose entire business model is based on ads — would be, if not pleasurable, then at least straightforward. But no. The user experience is so unrelentingly dreadful you start to wonder whether they’ve hired the world’s least sociable IT department and locked them in a basement with nothing but binary code and Haribo for company. And yet, despite the sheer Kafkaesque horror of clicking through menus that lead to other menus that lead to error messages that lead back to the first menu again — despite all of that — I find myself thinking, “Well, it’s actually better than the last time I tried it in 2015.” Which is rather like saying being repeatedly punched in the shin is “better” than being hit with a cricket bat: technically true, but not exactly a reassuring advert for the shin-punching industry.
One of the easier first decisions to make was whether to setup the instagram account as a Business or as a creator account… there was a really useful tip in this video that was selecting “entrepreneur” when setting up, in order to access the music that creator accounts previously only had access to… I haven’t yet checked this, but if it’s true it’s huge!
So why am I persisting with this nonsense? Because coliving in Tenerife is, frankly, brilliant. It’s people working remotely, sharing space, ideas, and occasionally a bottle of wine on the terrace at sunset. It’s saving money by not living in London, where the average rent makes you wonder if the landlord thinks the flat comes with a gold mine. It’s community — but without the horror of student flatmates who drink all your milk and then act shocked you wanted to keep it for tea. And I want people to discover us. To do so, however, I must either (a) master Meta’s byzantine advertising system, (b) hand over a large slice of every booking to an aggregator, or (c) conquer the dark art of SEO, which I am definitely progressing with, as it started here.
Now, these aggregators — they’re the middlemen of the digital age. They don’t build anything, cook anything, or clean anything. They just stand there, arms folded, creaming 20% off the top as if that’s the natural order of things. Twenty percent! Outrageous. Although, to be fair, building a platform that actually attracts thousands of people and persuading them to use it is probably quite difficult, so perhaps they deserve some of it. But still — I’d love to see that commission drift down to 10%, which at the moment feels like a fantasy reserved for the day the “invisible hand of the market” stops fiddling with its phone and actually lends a hand.
In the meantime, though, every booking through them will cost me at least £70 in commission (if I get any) — which, if you think about it, is money I could be spending on ads instead. And so here’s my logic: if I can claw my way onto page one of Google for “Tenerife coliving” or “coliving Tenerife,” then real, actual human beings might find me without my having to sacrifice a kidney to either Zuckerberg or the digital highwaymen. Perfect. But I need to be realistic, and until that glorious organic utopia arrives, £70 is, effectively, the price of outsourcing my marketing to an aggregator. Which means if I can wrestle Meta’s ghastly dashboard into something resembling functionality and generate a booking for less than £70, I’m ahead. Or at least not behind. Which, in the baffling world of digital marketing, apparently qualifies as “success.”
