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Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

Lack of fine-grained tracking makes it hard for small companies to target niche audiences. It tends to favor big brands who can do TV advertising or other highly non-targeted advertising. There was a point in the early 2010s were small consumer brands could break through the noise for cheap and find their audience. With the GDPR and the subsequent fall of facebook ads that era is sadly coming to an end.

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Heh. Facebook's advertising (still targeted because this decision isn't final yet) is desperately trying to sell me some shoes. The same shoes for the last 2 years.

For variation it gives me some crap ads from some online stores that are just a frontend for some Aliexpress drop shipping. The line is always the same "Unfortunately we're discontinuing $PRODUCT. Buy now to take advantage of the discount!"

I don't see what niche they're targeting with that.

That's a nice anecdote but the thousands of new, successful online brands that were built on well-targeted, cheap, Facebook advertising from ca. 2014-2020 are proof that your anecdote doesn't match everyone else's reality.

100% this. In the past, you would have to commit to a minimum of $1k/mo for local radio/tv/newspaper ads, and had no tracking and lagging indicators if the spend was effective. Classifieds in newspaper were cheaper, but still more expensive than FB. With $100/day on facebook charged to your CC, from my experience, you could almost overnight turn on 2-3 quality leads per day. This was life changing for a significant number of people.

This isn't possible anymore as you need to burn thousands to get enough learning to get scale with Facebook, especially if you're in the US with an audience that uses iPhones.

Google Search ads still work, because they own the whole stack and they aren't impacted by attribution, but the prices have been going up significantly as people move spend towards channels with better attribution.

All of this legislation and privacy advocacy is just a gift to Amazon/Google/Apple - everything is first party data for these "portal" businesses. Their ads will still work, and they'll have no real competition in direct-response marketing.

Yeah HN is sadly way off-base celebrating this decision. FB/Insta ads were a key catalyst of growth for thousands of startups and small brands in the 2010s. Now it's all back to square one without an easy growth channel to target niche audiences.

Enjoy watching Nissan ads on loop.

> FB/Insta ads were a key catalyst of growth for thousands of startups and small brands in the 2010s.

How many of those are genuine brands and startups and not a yet-another front for a multinational conglomerate (or marked up AliExpress pipeline)?

I find it insane how many people on this thread are accepting/defending the fact that advertising must be a persistent thing in our lives (including in inappropriate places such as personal communication tools) and that people must keep buying things (otherwise what would be the objective of said advertising?).

If targeted advertising benefits the user, they will opt-in (GDPR doesn’t outright outlaw it, it just requires informed consent). If you are having an existential crisis about people having this choice then maybe it’s time to recognise that you’ve always been a parasite that didn’t actually provide any value to users?

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