Why Facebook is well placed to weather an advertising boycott
economist.com
economist.com
I've taken the rather drastic step of unfollowing everyone just to get the utter garbage that is the feed out of my life.
I believe that if FB asked users to pay even a dollar a year more than half of the users would disappear.
But I don't actually have a problem with the ads. Ads targeted at me on Facebook are pretty good - they're often things I actually want to know about (like upcoming gigs in my area). I don't mind them and don't have a problem with their inclusion in my feed - it's the algorithmic content tangentially related to my friends which I detest.
WhatsApp used to require a small payment many years ago but would extend the free trial period if one did not pay. Maybe they were A/B testing the willingness of people to pay. They even blocked the app for a few days sometimes, then invariably unblocked it after a few days. Somebody paid, almost everybody didn't.
About Events, I didn't even know they have an app for that. I looked for it on Google Play and didn't find it. Is it part of the Facebook app? I saw people using Eventbrite when showing up at events. No in person events yet after the end of the lockdown.
If you just divide FB's revenue by users you'll get, say $20/year (no idea, someone look it up).
But if FB were to offer an ad-free experience for $20, the users willing to pay will be the most valuable. If you're willing to pay $20, you are probably worth $40 in advertising. Maybe you'd be willing to pay $40? Turns out those people are worth $80.
I think the idea has merit, a paid social media platform that fosters engagement with people you care about rather than driving "engagement" with the goal of more ad revenue.
https://investor.fb.com/financials/?section=quarterlyearning...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-...
They seem to be very good at categorizing things. After all, it's the foundation of their entire business model: placing people into a giant ontology of subjects and then selling access to that ontology to advertisers.
It's hard for me to believe that they can't notice that I basically hide every single political post no matter the subject that appears on my timeline. You'd think it would be easy for them to de-prioritize these and it would make the whole experience more appealing.
One of the simpler ways to fix social ills and misallocated resources is to utilize the price mechanism.
Because I believe that Facebook is such an utterly untrustworthy company that they would still sell me out to the highest bidder.
Note that I ditched my FB account in 2014 and never used any of their other properties, including WhatsApp.
I even logged in using incognito mode, using both Firefox and Chromium without any adblocker and I still didn't see anything except for posts by friends (and a few ads of course).
Perhaps I'm not getting anything else because I rarely log in, so they are hoping to get me back in by showing me stuff that I'm more likely to want?
This doesn't do what you think it does.
When you go to facebook.com incognito means you wont give them any of your normal cookies so facebook will be all like "Who is this guy???"
But then you log in, so facebook goes "oh I see it's lokedhs! welcome back!"
Incognito mode is designed to be undetectable. So from Facebook's point of view it looks like you signed in just like normal, and they will give you content just like normal.
Sorry for not being clear about that.
I was able to do this by aggressively curating my feed. It worked, but it was already too late. ~50% of my friends had already ditched Facebook, and the rest rarely posted.
The news articles really killed the social aspect of Facebook, and the social parts that were left are just infuriating and upsetting. You end up "socializing" more with strangers who hate you than with your friends.
Facebook could've been a fantastic business (though still a cancer on privacy) by being the "identity layer" of the web. Instead it decided to become the worst news aggregator combined with the comments sections of old YouTube videos. Truly some of the worst product decisions ever made.
Maybe group chat was always destined to kill the better side of FB, I don't know. I just know that FB uses extreme negative emotion to engage, and that's not a sustainable strategy.
I think Instagram still often has the feeling of being mostly posts from people you follow, but they could easily ruin that if they're not careful. Instagram comment sections are pretty gross.
There is a lot to read into this as I think many service’s social element is some form of fostering conflict.
I posted this link as another response. The average user spends 58 minutes a day.
I don't think I miss anything much
They have pretty much every app, website, device manufacturer in their pocket.
It's sick what VC funded diarrhea can accomplish. The fake liberal crap that these companies put out is at odds with their business model that eat away at the societal fabric in a meaningless manner.
The Facebook feed is their largest advertising and revenue stream. They do advertise elsewhere, but the stream is where a huge chunk of their money comes from.
> but you have already given enough data that they can carry it through all these "properties" without much loss.
The value of fresh users is much higher than stale years old data. This is why google has agreed to start dumping people's data after 18 months by default. Also, if you cut ties cleanly enough, they can't monetize the information they have on you regardless because they can't tie your account to your browsing. (That last bit is arguably the toughest part).
I just quit FB. I realized that it ceased adding value to my life some time ago. Turns out you can get a feed of what's interesting in people's lives just by texting them and sharing with them via text and email.
Australia's IM is dominated by Messenger too.
A fair number of my friends use Messenger because it's essentially the only thing other than SMS most everyone has. I use SMS and iMessage for a fairly decent sized group of friends.
Yes, almost exclusively. To the point where I made a list of my favorite two hundred publishers as an interest list and used that as my FB link in my browser toolbar. It makes a great link aggregator.
I also had separate topic lists, one just for recipes (17 follows), one just for tech news (60 follows), science (33 follows), entertainment (29 follows), art (24 follows), business (26 follows), and world news (58 follows). For some reason none of those lists work anymore, they all had to be recreated after a certain date, as a "custom list" instead of an "interest list". The basic workaround is, follow a page, add it to your list, unfollow it.
Conversely, I can have a list of just close friends, same thing applies, I only see their posts, not anything else.
The thing about lists is I could have multiple feeds instead of one news feed, and I can pick the feed I want.
FB is killing the list feature over time, I'm surprised it works in any capacity. It's not in the new redesign, and it's not in mobile.
I liked the idea of prismatic, but it surfaced mostly clickbait. Feedlys popular didn't feel as dynamic. Have you tried using Fb this way, or are you just telling me I should use something else? Why do you think I would find rss to be an improvement (I migrated from rss to Fb lists.)
I bet yes. People like seeing more content.
>just what they've posted
I bet your feed would be nearly empty. Not much people like to put effort in creating content. But everyone like to consume content.
CNN gives a general idea of the advertiser pulse https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/01/tech/facebook-top-advertisers...
> Even if all 100 of Facebook's biggest advertisers joined in, they would account for just 6% of the company's annual ad revenue.
Having worked with AdWords I can anecdotally say that a lot of smaller players would bid higher than the big fish. This is more dependent on margins than volume I reckon, and there are some smaller companies with very fat margins compared to large enterprises.
BMW is an example. Pretty weak, just like their cars.
I get that there are messages that are beyond the comfort zone of nearly everyone, but if you argue for diversity and inclusion while basically wanting certain users removed, they themselves should just leave and take the stuff they try to peddle with them.
Facebook in that sense similar to Google as an ad platform. Google has been threatening European publications that are refusing to allow it access to reader data that it will cut them off from the advertising avenues given it already gets permissions through its google accounts.
Seems like privacy laws and social pressure almost morphing into anti-competition sentiment for the big ad platforms.
I hope they keep strong against ambitions to scrap politically uncomfortable content. Should give the people removing 'hate speech' a rise though. Or therapy, it is probably needed. Would have been easier to ignore all that, but well...
Spending time on FB is deeply unpleasant. I finally deleted my account because I realized I hated spending time on it, and that outweighed any potential to communicate with long lost friends.
This boycott is also causing a conversation to occur where people are considering other options that are comparatively just a more pleasant experience.
In family alone, in the last month I’ve had a few different older family members who were looking for alternatives. Two of them (a couple of grandparents) surprisingly, were incredibly interested in setting up a family Discord server, so a couple weeks ago I helped them create one. In just a couple weeks it’s already up to like 25 family members, and it’s wildly active.
We started out with just a couple different channels–a holiday events channel so people can post holiday/birthday type party information and the general–but already some of the younger (like 14-15yo) have their own channels set up for themselves and real world friends. Considering it’s only a couple weeks old and seeing the activity it has is pretty wild to see.
One of the most striking things I’ve noticed is, the conversation is entirely different from something you would see on FB, it feels more natural somehow.
fb has just become an unpleasant experience, and not only because it makes people not like each other and the distrust it seems to cause, but it’s just not at all a pleasant experience when compared to some of the alternatives.
https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/
Advertisers buy into Facebook's ontology in order to target the ads. If you have no interests you'll likely not get targeted. Very few advertisers reach out to generic "male in their 30s", etc.
Then turn of all the other setting such as "Ads based on data from partners", etc.
The only thing that worried me is that Facebook sees me as someone with "Close friends of Women with a Birthday in 7-30 days"
That just sounds sleazy.
I think that's how they got in trouble a few years back because their initial one had subjects like "Nazi", etc., and you could buy ads targeting people interested in Nazis. I'm sure they've since gone through and methodically cleared out those sorts of subjects.
Facebook will eventually fall. They will desperately try to buy their competition. But the inherently parabolic behavior of social networks will catch up with them and eventually one competition will not agree to be bought.
The most interesting part is that those networks don't realize their inherently parablic growth and usually ending up behaving like they are still growing exponentially at the peak of their growth, quickening the decline.
That's not really happening with Facebook. It's true it's new subscriber growth is dropping, but it's existing users are actually quite static. We happen to live within a niche where "Dump Facebook" is trendy, but we aren't representative at all.
It "works", but it really can't be analytically measured ( isn't that convenient? )
It's an expensive billboard but the billboard it self generates the revenue and the cups are the flyers that infiltrate every corner of society. Most companies have to fight for attention every second of the day.
the ROI? who knows but most CEO's are not willing to learn the answer if it's "you failed as CEO because you didn't spend enough on marketing and now it's too late".
Also, nobody was fired for buying IBM.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2016/09/26/co...
This one seems to have a sales impact but it’s perhaps a more sophisticated campaign
https://www.wsj.com/articles/share-a-coke-credited-with-a-po...
I am proud to have avoided Facebook for years now due to privacy and abuse of skinner-boxing
1. the entire reason there can be a boycott at all is that FB is a primary ad platform. if FB were some insignificant flea of an ad network, a boycott wouldn't matter at all and wouldn't be organizeable, and not newsworthy.
2. having that kind of reach is powerful. every dollar spent there pays back. i know that many producers can't even spend enough on FB ads for lack of capital. There are entire finance companies built on giving you capital specifically so you can increase your FB spend. One of them has been highlighted here before, I can't recall the name though.
So there you have it. don't buy ads, watch your revenue drop. Advertisers are only boycotting (for the most part) because it's convenient. They want to reduce their spend, anyway. Once they are ready to increase their spend, they'll be back and be silent on it as well.
It's just so reminiscent of CSR. I'd actually collect the list of boycott companies, and once they return, boycott them. But it isn't worth the effort. I am not using their boycott as a virtue signal. It's just deceptive advertising, as usual.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+thedonald....
Imagine Biden becomes the next president. There will be far less outrage porn in a year or two, which would be very bad for Facebook. In other words, less outrage porn = less engagement. Less engagement = less advertisers. Even if the big companies make only 6% or so of their revenue, a 50% drop in engagement will be a tremendous loss for Facebook. Unlike Google ads, which are a function of economic activity, Facebook's ads are not based on search intent. I suppose they could be called more a function of people's psychology and need to engage with social media. So without sufficient levels of engagement, Facebook will lose a lot of money very quickly.
On the other hand, if Trump becomes president again, he will be less likely to significantly curb Twitter, since he needs it really badly. And he is more likely to go after the other social media platforms. At that point he wouldn't even be running for re-election again, so he can act as pettily as he wants and do a lot of showmanship to please his base. Facebook wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of his ledger.
Lastly, there are only a few months to go until the election. The likely damage in that short time span is far smaller than the possible benefits.
Facebook is just hedging its bets here.
I highly doubt that. Assuming that Biden wins, there will be an immense shit-sling from the Republicans for four years, and if Biden will be as centrist as it seems at the moment, then the frustrated Democrat Left will also put pressure on him for the whole time.
Facebook is staying neutral, and not giving into any pressure, mostly because Zuckerberg's job is safe and FB has plenty of cash!