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Comment by ChatGTP | Hacker News Reader

Bit off topic, but how on earth did Meta gross 116 billion USD ? lol

Of course we all find tech valuable, but that is absolutely stupid money for what I get out of their services, which is almost nothing hence I've not opened FB for weeks and I open Instagram for 2-3 minutes every day and turn it off, lately maybe every other day.

Even with more engaged users it's hard to believe it's worth that much money. Is the advertising really this effective ? Insane.

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> that is absolutely stupid money for what I get out of their services, which is almost nothing

That's why it's a free product! Revenue is from the value they deliver to advertisers. Meta's average revenue per user is significantly higher than other ad platforms (except Google).

For someone selling to a particular group of people, getting ads to that specific group, and ONLY that group, is really valuable.

I would guess that a chunk of income comes from selling datasets to interested parties, especially politically affiliated ones e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

That's nice and terrifying then.

Meta only lost income and credibility from that scandal, unless you believe the data breach was conspiratorial.

Seems likely to me. I can't recall Facebook acting in good faith at any point in time. If there's a bunch of money to be made assisting well-funded politicians, then I'd fully expect Facebook to be wanting a piece of that pie when their business model is generally to act against the users of the site by selling their data to manipulators.

Your guess is wildly mistaken. They did not intend to sell data to CA; and the CA events happened in 2014-2015 and the program CA abused was subsequently shut down.

To my mind that could be explained as CA exploiting Facebook users' data and Facebook shut down that program so that it could instead explicitly sell similar datasets.

Well, you're wildly mistaken again. The dataset is the golden goose -- they have no interest or incentive to sell it.

Selling data erodes Facebook's ability to make money selling ads (because then other people will be able to target users just as well). It's never been something they did intentionally.

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