Comment by jonnathanson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonnathanson | Hacker News Reader

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"...a large portion of their advertisers stop using them and that most of their products start losing popularity relatively quickly."

Facebook recently posted a 72% year-over-year gain in Q1 revenue, is stealing share of the online ad market from Google at a slow but increasing rate, and is growing mobile ad revenue by 30% year-over-year.[1]

It's not doing that just by introducing new ad space and new ad formats. It's not doing that by bleeding out existing advertisers. As much as we might not want to admit it, Facebook is becoming a pretty compelling advertising platform. This was not always the case. But the company's ad platform is maturing significantly. It's got a long ways to go, and it's not perfect by any means. But there's a lot of potential yet to be tapped, and by all accounts, the company is making progress in tapping it.

News of Facebook's supposedly declining popularity is also premature and exaggerated.

[1]http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230338000...

"It's not doing that just by introducing new ad space"

Maybe, but just a bit over a year ago they used to have two ads on the right hand side of their desktop version. Now they have seven ads in the same space. They also used to have one mobile ad in their news feed. Now they are sideways scrollable (I think there are five in total). The fanpages' organic posts are reaching fewer and fewer people in an attempt to make the owners pay for as many promoted posts as possible.

A point I noticed in their last earnings report reminded me of the reasoning in the OP's post: one of the signals of decelerating growth is the loss of popularity of early products. Their desktop ad business accounts for less than half of their revenue nowadays, despite the fact that there is a lot more ad space available there.

> OP's post: one of the signals of decelerating growth is the loss of popularity of early products.

Just because a blog says something, doesn't automatically make it true.

Be careful here. Facebook is growing ad revenue, but I haven't read anything yet that suggests users are interacting with the ads. After all, if the ads don't get clicks then eventually the advertisers will leave.

Your article doesn't speak to the efficacy of Facebook ads, does anyone have recent analysis on if the maturing Facebook ad platform is any better for getting clicks than their early efforts?

Don't judge a ad platform by it's ability to get clicks. What's important is it's ability to drive business for companies.

E.g. I'll happily pay $100 per click for if traffic has 50% conversion for a product that has a 1 year profit of $300. If conversion is 0.1% like some apps I'll still buy traffic but bid $0.20 for clicks. Even if the app has 10 times the clicks they will not earn as much as FB. Linking the right ads to the right people is the key for value/profit.

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