It's not; OP points to the direct wsj.com article (crippled with a "To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In " banner if not subscribed), while aresant to a search for the article on Google, and when coming with a Google referer the full article is displayed. Thanks aresant.
Could be a sign that they're doing so well it's not possible to invest it all effectively. Could also be a sign that they are transitioning to a mature company, where hoarding money means having a long runway to respond to market changes without going under (or begging investors for capital to keep you afloat).
Can someone tell me why this is being downvoted? Confession of a strongly held false believe and updating on evidence saying otherwise is a good thing, isn't it? Downvoting that seems weird to me.
Probably because he led with "That's slightly annoying." At a quick glance, it looks like he's annoyed that Facebook is doing well (which would just be petty and deserving of a downvote) as opposed to annoyed with himself for holding an incorrect belief so strongly.
Through clicking the "web" link it's exciting to see Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) [0] has support for this article. The WSJ paywall does not seem to affect it.
The load time for me on average wifi was almost unnoticeable.
AMP versions of articles are developed by publishers, not by Google, so it's there thanks to WSJ. As for the paywall, the AMP access component[1] is not stable, so WSJ's options were basically to skip AMP (and the associated traffic) or to skip the paywall.
That sounds like a bug they should definitely fix. I just tried the normal tap at the top of the screen to scroll to the beginning of a page, and it indeed breaks on AMP pages.
Good for them. Lots of people spend lots of time on Facebook, so ads get a lot of eyeballs, making them valuable. But I wonder what their clickthrough-rate is. For some types of ads, that's obviously not the point, but I doubt it's very high.
At first, I was curious how their drive towards more video, both user- and professionally-produced, will mesh with their real name policy. But since they allow 'pages' for public figures, businesses, content creators, and other more abstract entities, they may be able to strike a happy medium where content creators can broadcast under a well-known pseudonym, while content consumers are all real people with real identities, targetable with ads. With this setup, they can mount a true challenge against established video places like Youtube and Twitch.
Click through rate is going to vary dramatically by vertical, but just as a very rough comparison, it's not hard to get >1% CTR on mobile Newsfeed ads while years ago on a right-hand side small ad before Newsfeed ads I was always wishing for a consistent .1% CTR.
Facebook (and Google) have the best ad products on the market without any question.
I have so many DR clients printing money via FB ads, CTRs are not the metric we even focus on, it is all about conversions or measurement studies to support even investing in the platform. All my clients (big and small) love the platform, ad formats and service level.
> CTRs are not the metric we even focus on, it is all about conversions
If users don't even click on ads how do you measure conversions? Is it more a case of brand advertising where you're not looking for directly measurable sales?
They do click on the ad, and then they buy something. The parent is saying they don't care how many people click, they only care how many people buy (a subset of those that click).
All advertisers want to maximize ROI. Ad displayers want to maximize CPM. It's a mistake to focus on one specific metric, because they all multiply to form the actual metric you care about.
The point is that you're not looking at CTRs because FB surfaces conversion costs, which is a much more revenue-aligned metric. You can of course still look at CTRs to do micro-optimizations and copy tests with ads if you want, but the FB ad platform pushes you not to make that the focus. An ad for free money may have a high CTR but if the landing page is not actually delivering the value prop, the conversion cost will still be high. Likewise, an ad for, say, real estate services will have a much lower CTR (even if the service gives away "free money" :), but if the page is compelling and the clicks are real you can still have good cost per acquisition.
Ok I'm not familiar with the FB ad platform but how does FB surface conversion costs? Using your example of real estate services there's no way FB can tell whether someone becomes a client after clicking on the ad. And without that information FB cannot calculate conversion costs.
Facebook uses their pixel [1] to determine what their visitors do on their advertisers' sites. The pixel can be set with various options, such as a "purchase" pixel with a revenue component. When you initiate campaigns in Facebook you have the option to define a goal of conversions (views of a specific Facebook pixel), and Facebook will report back the conversions from your campaign.
> But I wonder what their clickthrough-rate is. For some types of ads, that's obviously not the point, but I doubt it's very high.
I think you hit the nail on the head. I don't have a facebook account, so I feel like I have gotten a chance to see facebook develop in leaps and bounds (unlike their users who see it changes incrementally). The way I've experienced this is that I peruse my wife's account for family pictures once every few months. I've definitely noticed an increase in both quality and quantity of ads. Facebook ads strike me like TV ads do. While they often offer clickthroughs, I'm astonished by the number of ads that are simple positional or brand ads that don't necessarily want you to do anything, but are there to stick their brand in your mind.
It's shockingly high, especially on Facebook Audience Network (FAN), Facebook's network of 3rd party publishers.
It was so high that I initially thought I was being defrauded. But upon closer inspection, it turns out that if you specify your industry/persona well in your ads, Facebook is incredibly efficient at matching demand with supply. I've never seen such good performance on any other mobile network, Google included.
FWIW, I've only done B2B marketing in my life. I have no idea for B2C folks.
How do you go about targeting B2B clients via Facebook? We have good success with consumer since that's a pretty broad audience and affordable for certain products but never managed to target busineses effectively within a reasonable cost.
I can't remember the last time I clicked an ad on Facebook, but what I do click on are sponsored articles that showcase apps or products that I am interested in but not sidebar ads.
I should have bought some facebook stock, but they are worth close to 400 billion dollars. Basically they are being forecasted to generate 20-30billion a year in cashflow at that valuation. I could see them maybe doing that, but its still a high valuation.
Forgot to mention, our conversion was kinda low too. So eventually we gave up ads on facebook. My friends who do mobile game publishing love facebook though. Kinda varies by verticles.
The big strength Facebook has now is very similar to Google's. They can rake in cash without having to spend a bunch of money to generate it. Unlike Apple they don't need to produce extremely polished and innovate hardware every single year.
Secondly it was very difficult for any other party to aggregate as many advertisers as Google had; Facebook pulled it off but it took a long time. Someone else may be able to do that too, but once virtually all ad revenue is digital there will be plenty of room for a third participant. There are other business models, but the ad revenue one allows companies to really laser focus on just growing and keeping their marketshare.
AI and post-mobile platforms are going to change things in ways investors aren't predicting. Facebook knows this and they certainly are demonstrating it, between wit.ai/messengers "bots" and Oculus. This larger generational shift may well open up gaps that directly threaten Google's core model more so than Facebook's.
Agree, I think this is a problem with Snapchat being a LA company vs a Valley company. They want to be a media company rather than a technology company.
You can see how IBM is putting a lot of money into (ads for) their "cognitive computing" stuff (probably crappier and more expensive than the competition)
They're pretty much drifting into irrelevance each passing day. But enough to fool some people into giving them money
Facebook managed to beat out it's competitors to the top spot, and maintain that spot long enough to the point where it has just become a constant in people's minds now. Every other attempt to dethrone has been too technical minded I think. There was that Diaspora that gave users privacy, only to find people didn't care about that (the majority). Then there was Google+, who again introduced a whole lot of lingo and looked complicated to use and why bother? Everyone's on Facebook after all, and Google = Search, everything else is just riff raff!
Once you stop talking to developers and programmers, you find that people don't give a shit about things remotely technical, and just use stuff because 'everyone else is using it'.
Saying all that, these days my FB feed has gone advert mad, and I find I mainly use it for event organisation instead. I do get the feeling it is slowly dying though despite being profitable, but whether it will be replaced by a new social networking site, or a set of separate apps with specific functions instead, remains to be seen.
I know of several people who choose to not waste their time with Facebook. Seriously, why? Any time I need to nudge somebody, that I don't care enough to bother with in the real world, there is Linked In. Everybody else either has my phone number, email address, or they are people I don't know.
>waste their time with Facebook
That's a bold statement. People like me use it as a lightweight option to stay abreast with whats going on with friends and family without having to invest in a long call or email. You may think I don't care, but I do- but its hard and time consuming to call 50 people and ask 'Did you go somewhere this summer? How was it? What did you see?'. Instead I just 'like' when I see a cool picture they share and when I call them I can start by saying 'Wow- you had such a good time in Paris- why don't you visit us next year?'
LinkedIn is a spammer paradise and a cancer for everybody else though. LinkedIn is designed decently but just as full of spam and overflow as Myspace was. Pretty much only worth using between jobs - but otherwise, I think there are much better platforms. They've become all about upselling: "Buy our premium membership and see the people who've seen your profile!" And they of course, sell your data and viewing habits without care.
It seems very common to me for people to act like there's no middle ground between not having a Facebook account and scrolling up and down the feed for hours a day. Personally, I use it for chat and events and that's basically it. Those two features however are very useful tools for me.
I just checked and the last thing I posted on my wall was a year ago. The thing before that 6 months before. Hardly a time sink.
> Every other attempt to dethrone has been too technical minded I think.
MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, LiveJournal, Tsu, Yahoo! 360, StudiVZ and Xanga weren't terribly technical, and yet still under-performed. For a while Facebook's success story was how highly technical and performance-oriented it was when compared with Twitter's fail whales and MySpace's enter-URL-and-go-get-some-lunch-while-it's-loading site speed.
You mistake what I mean, I meant that the sites that came after appeared more technical to the end user. Also those examples you give came before Facebook (mostly? Haven't even heard of some), which Facebook beat by providing a better service. That includes performance sure, also by restricting user customisation the UI always looked cleaner and more appealing, and it had far better social tools, providing a better experience all round.
Facebook always did and still looks super technical to me. It's not as visual as the average website. It has so many different windows/sections on every screen. And the settings portal has like 100 layers.
There's probably a lot of people on here who don't remember MySpace and Geocities, but restriction of UI customization was a huge FB advantage. The former proved that users cannot be trusted with foreground and background color control. Not to mention autoplaying music applets.
I'm not sure MySpace ever really knew what it wanted to achieve, other than providing a lot of inventory for ads.
Very little effort went into ever evolving the user experience beyond a v1, the backend underpinning it all was legendarily bad, and there was no concept of ad personalization whatsoever.
MySpace kind of stumbled across Music as a product direction, and developed something that was a bit like an ahead of its time version of Soundcloud, but discovery was still horrible and by then people were migrating to Facebook anyway.
Facebook's success was its real names policy & emphasis on friends. What can be simpler than using real names to connect with your friends instead of arbitrary usernames?
This created strong network effects, accelerated by seeding in universities (places with lots of friends).
The tech stuff allowed them to maintain their platform, it didn't differentiate the fundamental proposition.
Your (and my) problem with Facebook is with one subset of their produt: the newsfeed. Surely the newsfeed may be losing relevant and may "die" at some point, but the company has sufficiently diversified so that the death of the newsfeed won't be a problem.
> Every other attempt to dethrone has been too technical minded I think.
You've just triggered a favorite quote of mine:
"The single biggest failure of leadership is to treat adaptive challenges like technical problems." - Heifetz & Linsky [1]
In this context, technical problems are not technical in the sense that we might think of (software/hardware bound), it's in fact any problem that can be solved with a certain process, given enough resources and time. However technically intimidating they might be, those problems are the easy ones. The hardest challenges however are not technical but adaptive in nature where one of the biggest hurdles is to convince people to change their behavior.
> Once you stop talking to developers and programmers, you > find that people don't give a shit about things remotely > technical, and just use stuff because 'everyone else is using it'.
I can confirm. My parents aren't technical at all. They were confused when I told them people work at Facebook.
- Development/Ops (the technical side, from developing the services, supporting those services to debugging network problems and support of API users, it's a huge area)
- Sales/Commercial affairs/Customer support
- Localization/Editorial production
- Growth/Product management/UX and everything that goes in designing the product
Honestly, let's not give them that much credence, nor take them as any sort of proof that people don't care about privacy.
Diaspora was screwing up basics -- like, serving mixed HTTP content -- years into its development. Regardless of how it was marketed: Privacy first it was not.
Diaspora had (has) exceptionally poor technical execution. That from a guy who really wanted them to succeed.
I'm enjoying some parts of Ello now (yay! Markdown, embeds, and images), but also find it frustrating for long-lived fails: missing markdown entities (blockquotes), a very glitchy editor, and low-quality search.
Where's that Usenet discussion we were having a day or so back....
Not just Instagram, but Occulus Rift, and WhatsApp. They aren't afraid to spend for leaders in an area they aren't as strong in. They are a very exciting company that could see massive growth over the next 5 - 10 years as they become more than just the newsfeed people know them for.
yeah the Instagram buyout was a genius move...in retrospect the $1 billion was a bargain. Whatsapp keeps growing, although $18 billion still seems like a lot, but I think they will find a way to monetize it better. Facebook can't do wrong it seems. Like Google in 2005..and they keep doing better than ever too.
Interestingly, $700m of that purchase was in stock, with that stock now being worth about $3.2 billion after tomorrow's (assumed) price jump. That's going off of Dealbook's Facebook valuation tracker back in early 2012. Who knows of course how much of that stock was held on to up to this point, I suspect some made out extraordinarily well by keeping it.
Facebook, I think, will be one of the defining companies of this century, all built around improving the human network. This company has nowhere but up to go
agree. facebook, amazon, and google..three companies to rule the world. Investing in these stocks is like investing in the companies that are building the the matrix, unfolding in real life before our eyes.
Right now social media with their filter bubble, their megaphone and negativity-emission is anything but improving the human network.
I think they will learn and make things better for mankind, but they need to realise that just throwing mass-communication onto people won't fix things by itself.
"Release often, release early" is not good when it comes to emotional communication.
I find it interesting that Facebook is slowly starving Google of advertising revenue. Google has been singularly unsuccessful at developing a business outside of their search advertising business that makes them the sort of margins they need.
In my opinion Google is sacrificing their own search product[1] on the altar of staying alive looking for an answer that works. The challenge with that strategy is that a company that doesn't need search advertising to stay alive will have the freedom to compete with Google in terms of quality user experience.
One has to consider the question, what would the marginal cost of adding quality search to Facebook's infrastructure be? And what sort of margins would their search product need to return to support that? I can imagine a Facebook search product with the accuracy and reach of Google's but without the crappy pages that nobody really cares about anyway. With 15 - 30% margins instead of 80+% margins.
I remember watching IBM fade in the 1990's. It wasn't pretty and for as long as I could remember up to that point it had been the biggest fish in a very big market. The gorilla as some would say. I watched as an alliance of Microsoft and Intel decimated the retail business, Sun, HP, and later Dell decimated the server business. Nobody who mattered really thought IBM was dying or even threatened.
Google won by making Google a destination in every web browser, and Facebook is winning by making Facebook the destination on everyone's phone. And the desktop browsing experience is fading and fading.
Something will come along and derail Facebook but it won't be another social network. It will be something which changes a fundamental part of people behavior and interaction with their world.
[1] And to be clear it is creating a backlash by attempting to monetize so heavily the user experience is compromised as are the search results.
What ever the box gives me. (which is part of the problem) On my Surface Book, not surprisingly, lots of things end up going to Bing. My Firefox address box went to Yahoo! (which was really filled in by Bing) for a while, which was fine. Chrome of course tries really hard to only go to Google.
The challenge is that both Bing and Google give adequate results, and slowly over time Google has gotten more and more annoying when they detect I'm looking for something to buy (which really lights up the page with about 95% non-organic content). Bing is bad too but oddly, less bad.
I'm former FB. To your search question, I hope they build a high quality, accurate search product someday, but they've made a few attempts at search over the years and none of them have really panned out so far. Graph search was retired this year and now it's hard to discover things with search even when you know what you're looking for. And even before, graph search wasn't that accurate, it often didn't include posts in the results that it should have. It's a hard problem, but I think FB could solve it if they want to.
They recently pushed a video to people's timelines highlighting the search feature. I wonder if they made any improvements or if it was a marketing play.
It is absolutely a solvable problem technically, it's entirely cultural at this point[1]. The good news for FB is that they can kill Google just by squeezing its margins[2]. So they don't "need" search, but it will be the difference between what happens next at Microsoft.
There is a point where, like IBM and MySpace and any other market leaders get too far behind the margin curve, it results in a systemic collapse. That happens because the environment changes faster than management can change the company. I haven't figured out entirely what causes some companies to re-invent themselves (Dell, IBM) and others to become someone else's lawn ornament (Yahoo!, AOL).
[1] "they've made a few attempts at search over the years and none of them have really panned out so far." -- which is exactly the symptom of a cultural or organizational impediment.
Might be luck. But also for eg IBM: they were always in the business of servicing businesses. Hardware was just one way to do that, and weren't many mainframes leased instead of sold?
One advantage Facebook is access to social signals. All the link data Google has, Facebook could also crawl. However Google doesn't have access to all the social data Facebook has.
About the only data I can think of that Google has is behavior on the search results page (which links people choose against a query, bounce rates), which is probably very important, but FB could eventually catch up.
FB actually already has a search engine, they just don't have a separate site for it. But it's there, front and center (well up and center) on their page. They can slowly tinker with it to make it more and more relevant. Until they reach a point where it beats Google and is worthy to promote it to the media (or skip the media, just promote it to their own userbase).
I don't know, but I could probably find out. (But then I couldn't tell you.)
Working for Google, I do know that we have intense scrutiny and strong internal regulations for what one can do with customer data---and especially so with data that's private like emails or your browsing history.
From where I work in the company, the procedures and regulations are mostly concerned about <when not and when and perhaps how restricted> we can use customer data to reproduce and investigate bugs.
The data Facebook can use is mostly semi-public: posts on your wall that have varying but generally weak privacy expectations in the first place. Friend lists are probably totally fair game. (I don't know what Google does with G+ circles, but nobody is using G+ anyway.)
Anyway, all speculation apart from that there are pretty strong safeguards at Google.
(Google and even Facebook or Amazon etc treat your information much more carefully than probably almost any other place you put them. Eg most banks have incredible weak password protections, and my ISP is probably selling my postal address to spammers left-and-right.
The only reason to be afraid of what those giants do intentionally is that they are actually competent, and will do the best they can in the limits they imposed on them by themselves and regulators. (Break-ins by government-sponsored hackers are a different kettle of fish---but even there, the giants' efforts at fending them off are probably the most competent private sector responses.))
> The only reason to be afraid of what those giants do intentionally is that they are actually competent, and will do the best they can in the limits they imposed on them by themselves and regulators.
Actually as a Google shareholder I want the Gmail team to share customer data with the YouTube team. I doubt that Google's privacy policy prevents this, and it would certainly offer better targeting of ads and therefore more revenue. Is it considered evil for one branch of a company to share customer data with another branch? Wouldn't most users expect you to do that?
Google has many more signals than link data. One underrated signal is that they have a history of what links have previously been clicked for billions of search queries.
And in my case they have all my search history, all my Gmail messages, all the YouTube videos I watch, all the Android apps I install, all the places I search in Google maps.
And since I leave the 'track location' setting unchanged on my phone, Google also know where I live, when I wake up and go to sleep, where I work, how long I spend at the gym, where I go shopping.
And since my friend also has an Android phone, they likely know that he's my gym buddy and how often we get together. And since my girlfriend uses Google Maps on an iPhone they can probably see that she's my girlfriend and where we like to go out together.
Don't agree. FB growing fast yes, but Google's revenue still dwarfs FB.
FB is walled garden, in the long run, there always fail, the open web platform will prevail.
I will never use FB as my window into the world of events and news.
Microsoft is still has some power, they have embraced the open web and are even collaborating with Google, Eg Typescript Angular2, to counter the FB threat, I'm sure also that Apple and Samsung will be hostile to FB dominence.
Also new recent web standards, esp web components, will finally enable the web to be an application platform.
> Google won by making Google a destination in every web browser, and Facebook is winning by making Facebook the destination on everyone's phone.
This is not true - Google won by being associated in people's minds with "I want more information about XYZ". Facebook won by being associated with "I want to see what my friends and family have been up to".
> And the desktop browsing experience is fading and fading.
Google has a very strong grip on mobile. They own Android, they own the most popular browser on iOS [1] and their margins are so big that they can outbid competitors to be the default search engine for the second most popular browser.
> One has to consider the question, what would the marginal cost of adding quality search to Facebook's infrastructure be? And what sort of margins would their search product need to return to support that?
It would probably cost Facebook as much as it cost Microsoft, and the return on investment would probably be similar - ie. not great.
> It has been said many times, that something else will come around ... I think Facebook is here to stay.
Now that we've decided Facebook is here to stay, it's soon to be overthrown.
Initially, people expected Facebook to be replaced by a better looking or more exclusive version of Facebook (the way Facebook was a better looking and more exclusive version of MySpace). That never came to pass.
The next big threat was the shift to mobile. Mobile was a huge window of opportunity for potential competitors, because Facebook's itself made a slow transition to mobile. Facebook staved this off by identifying and acquiring threats (Instagram, WhatsApp, and a bid for Snapchat).
Its biggest threat remains the emergence of a new platform. I imagine that's why Zuckerberg made such a big gamble on VR; if VR could possibly be the next platform, he felt he needed to own it. It's starting to look like consumer demand for VR was way oversold, but maybe an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Another possibility is people will simply gradually lose interest in Facebook/Instagram. I deleted FB years ago and can't imagine going back, but apparently I'm not part of a bigger trend in this regard.
I don't think consumer interest in VR was oversold. The current options are doing quite well in the early adopter space, and I think we're on track for mass adoption in 5-10 years.
Only a few people had plasma/lcd screens when they first launched. Only a few people had the Internet in 1991. VR has only been in consumer hands for a few months.
> I don't think consumer interest in VR was oversold.
Some companies and people had very unrealistic expectations about VR when they entered the space. 5-10 years seems like a realistic timeline for potential mass adoption.
> Only a few people had plasma/lcd screens when they first launched
Only a few people had 3D TVs and Segways when they first launched. Unlike the iPhone, only a few people ever had the EyePhone [1]. It remains a question whether a critical mass of people will want VR. I've witnessed many people experiencing VR where it's like "Wow, this is totally amazing" for the first five minutes, followed by complete disinterest after 15 minutes. I think that suggests that there's something there, but there are also some barriers that haven't been identified and addressed yet.
I tend to agree. But why don't people want to strap something to their face? Is it the physical discomfort of the straps and the weight of the headset? That can be incrementally improved.
Is it the way the display cuts them off from the outside world? Some degree of immersion is desired -- people sit in dark theaters to watch movies -- but maybe VR is too much. I think it's fitting that Facebook/Zuckerberg thinks VR is the future of social networking. A "social" product that makes you feel more isolated.
I think they would have to get to the point where they are similar to regular sunglasses[0]. And the set up would have to be as simple as picking up a remote and turning on the tv. IOW, when someone puts on the VR glasses, they auto connect and start up immediately with little user intervention. Anyone other than a geek/nerd/techie, doesn't want to 'fiddle' with something to use it. They want it TV remote easy.
[0] Though I still tend to think that even this would not be enough for most people - see 3D glasses/TVs.
There is no way my mum or my grandparents will buy a VR headset in the next 5-10 years and use it every day. Not a chance.
VR is 50-100 years from "mass adoption" when the headsets are as light as sunglasses are today, either that, or when my kids grow in a culture of VR. A full generation at least.
I work for a Not-for-Profit in Health Care / Aged Care and we have bought Samsung VR headsets to take into the Aged Care Homes and the elderly people there have absolutely love the experiences they had.
Personally, I feel as though I'll accidentally think of the elderly as less human than the young, and forget that they can be open to new things as well. The more I've realized it about myself, the more I feel I begin to see it in others too.
I don't believe I was making the mistake of thinking of people a little older than me as being less human. I have elderly friends that are avid gamers and love thier smartphones, tablets, and Facebook (which I consider to have had mass adoption).
VR headsets I put in the same category as the Microsoft Kinect or the Nintendo Wii. They are kind of fun, impressive technologies, but ultimately they are kind of a pain to use.
This. The inertia it takes to actually use it has to become as low as flipping on the TV and channel surfing. Having to locate a headset, strap it on, etc. is not what people are willing to do. Also, people don't like things on their face.
Plasmas were tens of thousands of USD when they came out.
Let's put a pin in this comment and revisit it in 5-10 years. I don't have much faith in VR being a consumer favorite. They've never been found of having to put stuff on their faces.
> They've never been found of having to put stuff on their faces.
Obvious counterexamples are eye glasses and sunglasses. There is some tradeoff between utility and discomfort where it becomes viable, but it's not clear whether the technology can get there in 5-10 years.
I worked in the eyeglass business through college. A not insignificant number of people dislike wearing glasses. They are treated as a necessity in order to see, but there's not much enjoyment there (other than style, but that only goes so far).
I've had higher hopes for Kinect. But now Microsoft is shutting it down, with the IoT spirit of taking the software away from the few adopters they got over the six years.
I think everyone had high hopes for Kinect. When it launched, it was the fastest selling consumer device of all time, and it looked for a while like it would help open the XBox platform up to a new audience of casual gamers who weren't into epic-sized shooting games.
What did for Kinect wasn't really anything Microsoft did so much as the market deciding that they wanted the smartphone to be the centre of their universe for gaming with the TV a peripheral. That that would turn out to be the case wasn't at all obvious in 2010.
And even if Facebook itself saw a decline, the business could still be quite successful from their properties alone.
Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp – all quite valuable, not to mention other standalone products within Facebook like Messenger (that just crossed 1 billion MAUs).
Windows is closer to irrelevant now than ever before. Many people use non windows tablets and phones far more than desktops. Some websites see far more non desktop users than desktop users so arguably their market share is under 50%.
'Closer to irrelevant' is a bold statement to say. Windows is strong, not as strong as in the 90's where it was the only consumer oriented OS, but is far, far away from being 'irrelevant'.
With more than four times as many android phones being sold than Windows machines it's not as far fetched as you might think.
For a more direct comparison Windows phone has 5% of iOS market share and 1% of Androids. Most major software news is off Windows Instagram and Pokemon Go for example really don't care about the desktop. The web got good enough that many services are native on mobile and Windoes just gets a website.
Myspace is irrelevant, but not quite dead yet. Facebook like IBM is going to stick around in one form or another for a long time. Their real risk is maximizing profit may not be the same as maintaining dominance, so they may slowly kill off their service over 10+ profitable followed by a slow decline.
And really Facebooks main problem is they have so many users they can't really grow revenue by adding more. Which means revenue growth is generally going to drive people away.
They don't need more users...they are able to keep growing advertising revenue by filling more slots, finding new advertising venues such as Instagram, and through higher bids.
I have a feeling that snapchat is their biggest threat. It offered something that facebook doesn't: a lack of a practical record.
Now it is slowly evolving into video twitter & personal news feeds. I can see it eventually adopting the rest of the functions that facebook has today. Recently they've added permanence with memories. Memories although give personal control and still prevent a bunch of problems of people seeing "the wrong facebook updates"
Via nation state opt-ins we have larger groups of people like the United Nations, Commonwealth (2.2B), OECD, NATO, etc.
On an personal opt-in basis, the Catholic Church has 1.27B now, so Facebook is beating that. So yes, maybe Facebook has now become the largest single-org individual opt-in in history. Anyone know of a competitor?
Note that these are Google registrations, which include ... numerous things. I suspect most are Android activations.
The data were the basis for my own estimates of G+ user activity -- only 9% of the (then) 2.2 billion G+ profiles showed any public activity, far fewer than that if you were looking for activity in the past month.
Their huge ad scale provides a very flexible revenue machine. I think when FB misses a quarter it will be a big miss. Otherwise they can scale up ad units and make millions in incremental revenue if they need to pad a quarter.
Given the sheer volume of WSJ paywall links posted here, combined with the significance of YC, surely someone at YC could call someone at WSJ and get them to bypass the paywall when the referrer is HN. This is getting ridiculous. I'm familiar with the "web" link but even that gets old when every 4th or 5th link goes to WSJ.
It's "literally right next to the article link" after clicking over to the comments page, which I don't normally do at first. So the process is click on article -> get annoyed by paywall -> hit back button -> click comments page -> click web link -> click to article - for a significant percentage of the links on the front page. Not awesome.
Perhaps the default link on all WSJ articles should be converted to the web link. That would solve the problem too. The volume is high enough that special treatment of these links is warranted.
No. The volume of links to this one particular site with a very aggressive paywall has been increasing. Further, HN administrators actually change links pointing to alternative sites over to paywalled WSJ URLs when WSJ has the story (I know, because it happened with a story I submitted).
WSJ has provided you with free content
They're not ad supported?
How about signing up for the WSJ?
I might consider it, if they weren't so obnoxious with the paywall, along with inundating their pages with ads and completely blocking the loading of content when using an ad blocker. I will not reward that type of behavior, and neither should anyone else. I reported them to Google for cloaking a few weeks ago because under certain circumstances, the paywall comes up even when clicking over from Google (so, to your argument that "HN has provided [me] with a workaround" - that isn't always the case because they flagrantly violate Google's anti-cloaking policy under certain circumstances, on top of everything else).
As far as I can tell, some people believe everyone elses primary purpose should be to make their life better. The owners, writers, marketers, developers, and other stakeholders in the wsj shouldn't be thinking about providing for themselves, they should be nobly sacrificing their lives so that we have something amusing to read for a minute or so a couple times a week (for free of course).
A few days ago I was talking to a guy in real life about pokemon go and he was both genuinely angry at the developers and also, unironically, called them entitled. I was flabbergasted. Entitled for making something and allowing this guy to use it, but him being genuinely angry at people he'd never met, nor had any dealings with, for not providing enough value was completely reasonable to him.
All I know is that if I ever run a business or accidentally become a celebrity, I'm keeping an army of PR suits between me and the general public. Too many people indignant about too many things to attempt honest public discourse with my real name attached.
As far as I can tell, some people believe everyone elses primary purpose should be to make their life better.
I made a statement that it might be nice if WSJ gave HN users the same treatment they give to Google users. You've made a radical generalization about someone based upon a single statement on a comment thread.
People that make radical generalizations about others based upon one data point are among the most dangerous in our society. Hitler did this, as do religiously motivated terrorists, racists, etc. Upon what other data points do you make such generalizations? Race? Religion? Sex?
I demanded nothing, nor was I indignant. Before you and your ilk saw someone whose opinion you disagreed with and pounced, this was my statement:
Given the sheer volume of WSJ paywall links posted here, combined with the significance of YC, surely someone at YC could call someone at WSJ and get them to bypass the paywall when the referrer is HN.
It was an explanation of a problem and a suggested solution. Nothing more, nothing less.
>Dispassionate egoists don't blow themselves up.
Given your comments above, it's pretty clear that you are far from dispassionate in your hatred of those with whom you disagree.
Sure, just ignore everything else you typed. That seems reasonable.
"Explanation of a problem" even here you're showing of what I've accused you of. You have a problem. HN doesn't seem to have a problem. WSJ doesn't seem to have a problem. But you're phrasing it like it's something objectively wrong. It's not a problem it's your problem.
You don't like something and you want it a different way. That's fine. But adding all of this shit about them being abusive, obnoxious, calling them ridiculous; shows that no, you don't just want something to be a certain way you think that there's a failure on someones part if it isn't.
Now you appear to be trying to what, back peddle in to the part of disinterested bystander? At least own up to your sense of entitlement. It's as defensible of a position as any other.
EDIT:
dispassionate in your hatred of those with whom you disagree.
Hatred is what you're getting from this? Yeah this isn't going anywhere.
Do you honestly think that I care what you believe? I made a statement. I would consider paying WSJ because of the high quality content if they weren't such abusive people, but because they are, they won't get a dime from me. I also never even mildly suggested that they should have no ads, only that they shouldn't make web browsers grind to a halt with so many ads.
Finally after about 10 years of using Facebook I was given a relevant ad last week.
Admittedly I cunningly lie about my age in Facebook and say I was born in 1918 (but on the correct day/month for my half-friends who don't know the actual date).
FB makes 70% of its ad revenue from mobile. Can someone please explain to me the value prop of mobile ads? Doesn't the small screen size put a lid on how much advertisers will bid for that space? After all, on web sites, the ad unit size correlates with CPM price.
It would be amazing if they at least started looking at what types of ads they are running. Some, if not even most, are completely against local regulation. The rest are outright actual scams or some multi-level marketing schemes.
50 years from now, our kids wont remember Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, it will be Mark Zuckerburg sitting on a stage ready to release mosquitoes on to the audience.
I still remember the very widespread arguments that were made before Facebook was heavily monetizing their platform/s: that they would make more money by charging subscription fees.
That turns out to have been false. They're getting $14.34 per year per user in the US, up ~50% over last year. There's no scenario under which they could match that with a subscription service (most people would never be willing to pay).
They're averaging $3.84 per user worldwide, up 38% over last year. You can't go around raising subscription fees by 40% or 50% per year on most of the world, but you can optimize delivering them advertising. You can boost ad rates by 50% without harming the user experience one bit.
The ad approach won again, easily.In Facebook it's going to end up producing another eventual $20+ billion annual profit money printing juggernaut ala Google. No subscription service in history has ever come close to accomplishing that sort of outcome, none ever will.
199 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadhttps://www.google.com/search?q=Facebook+Posts+Strong+Profit...
EDIT: and thanks for fixing it ;)
The load time for me on average wifi was almost unnoticeable.
[0]: https://www.ampproject.org/
[1]: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/extensions...
There're already extensions circumventing it.
http://imgur.com/tg7PqBu
Got this from this page:
https://www.google.com/amp/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook...
(You can't view it from desktop as they're doing browser detection and forward you to the WSJ page.)
[1]: http://i.imgur.com/Jlu6JRX.png
At first, I was curious how their drive towards more video, both user- and professionally-produced, will mesh with their real name policy. But since they allow 'pages' for public figures, businesses, content creators, and other more abstract entities, they may be able to strike a happy medium where content creators can broadcast under a well-known pseudonym, while content consumers are all real people with real identities, targetable with ads. With this setup, they can mount a true challenge against established video places like Youtube and Twitch.
I have so many DR clients printing money via FB ads, CTRs are not the metric we even focus on, it is all about conversions or measurement studies to support even investing in the platform. All my clients (big and small) love the platform, ad formats and service level.
Great company, well deserved success.
If users don't even click on ads how do you measure conversions? Is it more a case of brand advertising where you're not looking for directly measurable sales?
1: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/952192354843755
[0] http://successwise.com/what-is-direct-response-marketing
I think you hit the nail on the head. I don't have a facebook account, so I feel like I have gotten a chance to see facebook develop in leaps and bounds (unlike their users who see it changes incrementally). The way I've experienced this is that I peruse my wife's account for family pictures once every few months. I've definitely noticed an increase in both quality and quantity of ads. Facebook ads strike me like TV ads do. While they often offer clickthroughs, I'm astonished by the number of ads that are simple positional or brand ads that don't necessarily want you to do anything, but are there to stick their brand in your mind.
It's shockingly high, especially on Facebook Audience Network (FAN), Facebook's network of 3rd party publishers.
It was so high that I initially thought I was being defrauded. But upon closer inspection, it turns out that if you specify your industry/persona well in your ads, Facebook is incredibly efficient at matching demand with supply. I've never seen such good performance on any other mobile network, Google included.
FWIW, I've only done B2B marketing in my life. I have no idea for B2C folks.
I guess they have huge PV so overall performance is high. I wonder what the actual would ROI be for other publishers on FB.
They're still doing well. They bought Instagram. (I think a very smart move.) They'll eventually buy the next big thing.
I think Facebook is here to stay.
Unless the next big thing refuses to do so.
The big strength Facebook has now is very similar to Google's. They can rake in cash without having to spend a bunch of money to generate it. Unlike Apple they don't need to produce extremely polished and innovate hardware every single year.
Secondly it was very difficult for any other party to aggregate as many advertisers as Google had; Facebook pulled it off but it took a long time. Someone else may be able to do that too, but once virtually all ad revenue is digital there will be plenty of room for a third participant. There are other business models, but the ad revenue one allows companies to really laser focus on just growing and keeping their marketshare.
AI and post-mobile platforms are going to change things in ways investors aren't predicting. Facebook knows this and they certainly are demonstrating it, between wit.ai/messengers "bots" and Oculus. This larger generational shift may well open up gaps that directly threaten Google's core model more so than Facebook's.
Oh, wait...
They're pretty much drifting into irrelevance each passing day. But enough to fool some people into giving them money
Once you stop talking to developers and programmers, you find that people don't give a shit about things remotely technical, and just use stuff because 'everyone else is using it'.
Saying all that, these days my FB feed has gone advert mad, and I find I mainly use it for event organisation instead. I do get the feeling it is slowly dying though despite being profitable, but whether it will be replaced by a new social networking site, or a set of separate apps with specific functions instead, remains to be seen.
I know of several people who choose to not waste their time with Facebook. Seriously, why? Any time I need to nudge somebody, that I don't care enough to bother with in the real world, there is Linked In. Everybody else either has my phone number, email address, or they are people I don't know.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2013/09/03/has-linked...
I just checked and the last thing I posted on my wall was a year ago. The thing before that 6 months before. Hardly a time sink.
MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, LiveJournal, Tsu, Yahoo! 360, StudiVZ and Xanga weren't terribly technical, and yet still under-performed. For a while Facebook's success story was how highly technical and performance-oriented it was when compared with Twitter's fail whales and MySpace's enter-URL-and-go-get-some-lunch-while-it's-loading site speed.
Very little effort went into ever evolving the user experience beyond a v1, the backend underpinning it all was legendarily bad, and there was no concept of ad personalization whatsoever.
MySpace kind of stumbled across Music as a product direction, and developed something that was a bit like an ahead of its time version of Soundcloud, but discovery was still horrible and by then people were migrating to Facebook anyway.
This created strong network effects, accelerated by seeding in universities (places with lots of friends).
The tech stuff allowed them to maintain their platform, it didn't differentiate the fundamental proposition.
You've just triggered a favorite quote of mine:
"The single biggest failure of leadership is to treat adaptive challenges like technical problems." - Heifetz & Linsky [1]
In this context, technical problems are not technical in the sense that we might think of (software/hardware bound), it's in fact any problem that can be solved with a certain process, given enough resources and time. However technically intimidating they might be, those problems are the easy ones. The hardest challenges however are not technical but adaptive in nature where one of the biggest hurdles is to convince people to change their behavior.
[1] A better summary: http://www.sgaumc.org/files/files_library/technical_vs_adapt...
I can confirm. My parents aren't technical at all. They were confused when I told them people work at Facebook.
What do those 15k do?
you mean like trying to cross a speeding-bus and breaking a leg?...
But it can be explained as:
- Development/Ops (the technical side, from developing the services, supporting those services to debugging network problems and support of API users, it's a huge area)
- Sales/Commercial affairs/Customer support
- Localization/Editorial production
- Growth/Product management/UX and everything that goes in designing the product
- Corporate support functions (HR/Legal etc)
Honestly, let's not give them that much credence, nor take them as any sort of proof that people don't care about privacy.
Diaspora was screwing up basics -- like, serving mixed HTTP content -- years into its development. Regardless of how it was marketed: Privacy first it was not.
I'm enjoying some parts of Ello now (yay! Markdown, embeds, and images), but also find it frustrating for long-lived fails: missing markdown entities (blockquotes), a very glitchy editor, and low-quality search.
Where's that Usenet discussion we were having a day or so back....
Well, that just sounds like an open invitation to challenge them.
I think they will learn and make things better for mankind, but they need to realise that just throwing mass-communication onto people won't fix things by itself.
"Release often, release early" is not good when it comes to emotional communication.
In my opinion Google is sacrificing their own search product[1] on the altar of staying alive looking for an answer that works. The challenge with that strategy is that a company that doesn't need search advertising to stay alive will have the freedom to compete with Google in terms of quality user experience.
One has to consider the question, what would the marginal cost of adding quality search to Facebook's infrastructure be? And what sort of margins would their search product need to return to support that? I can imagine a Facebook search product with the accuracy and reach of Google's but without the crappy pages that nobody really cares about anyway. With 15 - 30% margins instead of 80+% margins.
I remember watching IBM fade in the 1990's. It wasn't pretty and for as long as I could remember up to that point it had been the biggest fish in a very big market. The gorilla as some would say. I watched as an alliance of Microsoft and Intel decimated the retail business, Sun, HP, and later Dell decimated the server business. Nobody who mattered really thought IBM was dying or even threatened.
Google won by making Google a destination in every web browser, and Facebook is winning by making Facebook the destination on everyone's phone. And the desktop browsing experience is fading and fading.
Something will come along and derail Facebook but it won't be another social network. It will be something which changes a fundamental part of people behavior and interaction with their world.
[1] And to be clear it is creating a backlash by attempting to monetize so heavily the user experience is compromised as are the search results.
The challenge is that both Bing and Google give adequate results, and slowly over time Google has gotten more and more annoying when they detect I'm looking for something to buy (which really lights up the page with about 95% non-organic content). Bing is bad too but oddly, less bad.
There is a point where, like IBM and MySpace and any other market leaders get too far behind the margin curve, it results in a systemic collapse. That happens because the environment changes faster than management can change the company. I haven't figured out entirely what causes some companies to re-invent themselves (Dell, IBM) and others to become someone else's lawn ornament (Yahoo!, AOL).
[1] "they've made a few attempts at search over the years and none of them have really panned out so far." -- which is exactly the symptom of a cultural or organizational impediment.
[2] Bing is helping too of course.
About the only data I can think of that Google has is behavior on the search results page (which links people choose against a query, bounce rates), which is probably very important, but FB could eventually catch up.
FB actually already has a search engine, they just don't have a separate site for it. But it's there, front and center (well up and center) on their page. They can slowly tinker with it to make it more and more relevant. Until they reach a point where it beats Google and is worthy to promote it to the media (or skip the media, just promote it to their own userbase).
(But there's an important distinction: Google is not free to use that data in gmail they have.)
Wait, are you saying that if I write, "I love coffee" in Gmail, Google cannot use that to show me an advertisement for Starbucks in YouTube?
Working for Google, I do know that we have intense scrutiny and strong internal regulations for what one can do with customer data---and especially so with data that's private like emails or your browsing history.
From where I work in the company, the procedures and regulations are mostly concerned about <when not and when and perhaps how restricted> we can use customer data to reproduce and investigate bugs.
The data Facebook can use is mostly semi-public: posts on your wall that have varying but generally weak privacy expectations in the first place. Friend lists are probably totally fair game. (I don't know what Google does with G+ circles, but nobody is using G+ anyway.)
Anyway, all speculation apart from that there are pretty strong safeguards at Google.
(Google and even Facebook or Amazon etc treat your information much more carefully than probably almost any other place you put them. Eg most banks have incredible weak password protections, and my ISP is probably selling my postal address to spammers left-and-right.
The only reason to be afraid of what those giants do intentionally is that they are actually competent, and will do the best they can in the limits they imposed on them by themselves and regulators. (Break-ins by government-sponsored hackers are a different kettle of fish---but even there, the giants' efforts at fending them off are probably the most competent private sector responses.))
Actually as a Google shareholder I want the Gmail team to share customer data with the YouTube team. I doubt that Google's privacy policy prevents this, and it would certainly offer better targeting of ads and therefore more revenue. Is it considered evil for one branch of a company to share customer data with another branch? Wouldn't most users expect you to do that?
And in my case they have all my search history, all my Gmail messages, all the YouTube videos I watch, all the Android apps I install, all the places I search in Google maps.
And since I leave the 'track location' setting unchanged on my phone, Google also know where I live, when I wake up and go to sleep, where I work, how long I spend at the gym, where I go shopping.
And since my friend also has an Android phone, they likely know that he's my gym buddy and how often we get together. And since my girlfriend uses Google Maps on an iPhone they can probably see that she's my girlfriend and where we like to go out together.
This is not true - Google won by being associated in people's minds with "I want more information about XYZ". Facebook won by being associated with "I want to see what my friends and family have been up to".
> And the desktop browsing experience is fading and fading.
Google has a very strong grip on mobile. They own Android, they own the most popular browser on iOS [1] and their margins are so big that they can outbid competitors to be the default search engine for the second most popular browser.
> One has to consider the question, what would the marginal cost of adding quality search to Facebook's infrastructure be? And what sort of margins would their search product need to return to support that?
It would probably cost Facebook as much as it cost Microsoft, and the return on investment would probably be similar - ie. not great.
[1] http://thenextweb.com/apple/2016/03/18/study-shows-chrome-be...
Now that we've decided Facebook is here to stay, it's soon to be overthrown.
Initially, people expected Facebook to be replaced by a better looking or more exclusive version of Facebook (the way Facebook was a better looking and more exclusive version of MySpace). That never came to pass.
The next big threat was the shift to mobile. Mobile was a huge window of opportunity for potential competitors, because Facebook's itself made a slow transition to mobile. Facebook staved this off by identifying and acquiring threats (Instagram, WhatsApp, and a bid for Snapchat).
Its biggest threat remains the emergence of a new platform. I imagine that's why Zuckerberg made such a big gamble on VR; if VR could possibly be the next platform, he felt he needed to own it. It's starting to look like consumer demand for VR was way oversold, but maybe an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Another possibility is people will simply gradually lose interest in Facebook/Instagram. I deleted FB years ago and can't imagine going back, but apparently I'm not part of a bigger trend in this regard.
Only a few people had plasma/lcd screens when they first launched. Only a few people had the Internet in 1991. VR has only been in consumer hands for a few months.
Some companies and people had very unrealistic expectations about VR when they entered the space. 5-10 years seems like a realistic timeline for potential mass adoption.
> Only a few people had plasma/lcd screens when they first launched
Only a few people had 3D TVs and Segways when they first launched. Unlike the iPhone, only a few people ever had the EyePhone [1]. It remains a question whether a critical mass of people will want VR. I've witnessed many people experiencing VR where it's like "Wow, this is totally amazing" for the first five minutes, followed by complete disinterest after 15 minutes. I think that suggests that there's something there, but there are also some barriers that haven't been identified and addressed yet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research#The_EyePhone
Is it the way the display cuts them off from the outside world? Some degree of immersion is desired -- people sit in dark theaters to watch movies -- but maybe VR is too much. I think it's fitting that Facebook/Zuckerberg thinks VR is the future of social networking. A "social" product that makes you feel more isolated.
[0] Though I still tend to think that even this would not be enough for most people - see 3D glasses/TVs.
VR is 50-100 years from "mass adoption" when the headsets are as light as sunglasses are today, either that, or when my kids grow in a culture of VR. A full generation at least.
I work for a Not-for-Profit in Health Care / Aged Care and we have bought Samsung VR headsets to take into the Aged Care Homes and the elderly people there have absolutely love the experiences they had.
VR headsets I put in the same category as the Microsoft Kinect or the Nintendo Wii. They are kind of fun, impressive technologies, but ultimately they are kind of a pain to use.
This. The inertia it takes to actually use it has to become as low as flipping on the TV and channel surfing. Having to locate a headset, strap it on, etc. is not what people are willing to do. Also, people don't like things on their face.
Let's put a pin in this comment and revisit it in 5-10 years. I don't have much faith in VR being a consumer favorite. They've never been found of having to put stuff on their faces.
Obvious counterexamples are eye glasses and sunglasses. There is some tradeoff between utility and discomfort where it becomes viable, but it's not clear whether the technology can get there in 5-10 years.
What did for Kinect wasn't really anything Microsoft did so much as the market deciding that they wanted the smartphone to be the centre of their universe for gaming with the TV a peripheral. That that would turn out to be the case wasn't at all obvious in 2010.
People thought something would replace Microsoft...30 years later Windows and World still more dominant than ever
For a more direct comparison Windows phone has 5% of iOS market share and 1% of Androids. Most major software news is off Windows Instagram and Pokemon Go for example really don't care about the desktop. The web got good enough that many services are native on mobile and Windoes just gets a website.
And really Facebooks main problem is they have so many users they can't really grow revenue by adding more. Which means revenue growth is generally going to drive people away.
Now it is slowly evolving into video twitter & personal news feeds. I can see it eventually adopting the rest of the functions that facebook has today. Recently they've added permanence with memories. Memories although give personal control and still prevent a bunch of problems of people seeing "the wrong facebook updates"
So does that mean Facebook is now the largest affiliated group of human beings ever?
On an personal opt-in basis, the Catholic Church has 1.27B now, so Facebook is beating that. So yes, maybe Facebook has now become the largest single-org individual opt-in in history. Anyone know of a competitor?
Up to 3.179 billion: http://plus.miernicki.com/
Note that these are Google registrations, which include ... numerous things. I suspect most are Android activations.
The data were the basis for my own estimates of G+ user activity -- only 9% of the (then) 2.2 billion G+ profiles showed any public activity, far fewer than that if you were looking for activity in the past month.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq
Interesting. Neither of those is "social".
Perhaps the default link on all WSJ articles should be converted to the web link. That would solve the problem too. The volume is high enough that special treatment of these links is warranted.
HN has provided you with a workaround, WSJ has provided you with free content, and that is not enough?
How about signing up for the WSJ?
No. The volume of links to this one particular site with a very aggressive paywall has been increasing. Further, HN administrators actually change links pointing to alternative sites over to paywalled WSJ URLs when WSJ has the story (I know, because it happened with a story I submitted).
WSJ has provided you with free content
They're not ad supported?
How about signing up for the WSJ?
I might consider it, if they weren't so obnoxious with the paywall, along with inundating their pages with ads and completely blocking the loading of content when using an ad blocker. I will not reward that type of behavior, and neither should anyone else. I reported them to Google for cloaking a few weeks ago because under certain circumstances, the paywall comes up even when clicking over from Google (so, to your argument that "HN has provided [me] with a workaround" - that isn't always the case because they flagrantly violate Google's anti-cloaking policy under certain circumstances, on top of everything else).
> I will not reward that type of behavior
My mind is being blown. I'm completely feeding right now.
A few days ago I was talking to a guy in real life about pokemon go and he was both genuinely angry at the developers and also, unironically, called them entitled. I was flabbergasted. Entitled for making something and allowing this guy to use it, but him being genuinely angry at people he'd never met, nor had any dealings with, for not providing enough value was completely reasonable to him.
All I know is that if I ever run a business or accidentally become a celebrity, I'm keeping an army of PR suits between me and the general public. Too many people indignant about too many things to attempt honest public discourse with my real name attached.
I made a statement that it might be nice if WSJ gave HN users the same treatment they give to Google users. You've made a radical generalization about someone based upon a single statement on a comment thread.
People that make radical generalizations about others based upon one data point are among the most dangerous in our society. Hitler did this, as do religiously motivated terrorists, racists, etc. Upon what other data points do you make such generalizations? Race? Religion? Sex?
People that make radical generalizations about others based upon one data point are among the most dangerous in our society.
People that get indignant and demanding about things are some of the most dangerous in society. Dispassionate egoists don't blow themselves up.
Given the sheer volume of WSJ paywall links posted here, combined with the significance of YC, surely someone at YC could call someone at WSJ and get them to bypass the paywall when the referrer is HN.
It was an explanation of a problem and a suggested solution. Nothing more, nothing less.
>Dispassionate egoists don't blow themselves up.
Given your comments above, it's pretty clear that you are far from dispassionate in your hatred of those with whom you disagree.
"Explanation of a problem" even here you're showing of what I've accused you of. You have a problem. HN doesn't seem to have a problem. WSJ doesn't seem to have a problem. But you're phrasing it like it's something objectively wrong. It's not a problem it's your problem.
You don't like something and you want it a different way. That's fine. But adding all of this shit about them being abusive, obnoxious, calling them ridiculous; shows that no, you don't just want something to be a certain way you think that there's a failure on someones part if it isn't.
Now you appear to be trying to what, back peddle in to the part of disinterested bystander? At least own up to your sense of entitlement. It's as defensible of a position as any other.
EDIT:
dispassionate in your hatred of those with whom you disagree.
Hatred is what you're getting from this? Yeah this isn't going anywhere.
> this isn't going anywhere.
You're correct, this isn't going anywhere.
"If they gave me all the content upfront for free without ads, I would then choose pay for it".
You expect us to believe this?
I'd expect Microsoft to buy them. It'd make more sense than LinkedIn, and cheaper, too!
Note: TWTR dropped by 15% today.
Admittedly I cunningly lie about my age in Facebook and say I was born in 1918 (but on the correct day/month for my half-friends who don't know the actual date).
That turns out to have been false. They're getting $14.34 per year per user in the US, up ~50% over last year. There's no scenario under which they could match that with a subscription service (most people would never be willing to pay).
They're averaging $3.84 per user worldwide, up 38% over last year. You can't go around raising subscription fees by 40% or 50% per year on most of the world, but you can optimize delivering them advertising. You can boost ad rates by 50% without harming the user experience one bit.
The ad approach won again, easily.In Facebook it's going to end up producing another eventual $20+ billion annual profit money printing juggernaut ala Google. No subscription service in history has ever come close to accomplishing that sort of outcome, none ever will.
Proper Adblock on mobile devices will dilute their revenues :)