It does seem very convenient timing, the article talks about Starbucks spending less than half of its ad spend compared to same time last year. When push comes to shove they are bound to return to one of the biggest advertising platforms.
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.
Does anyone actually like seeing publisher content on their Facebook feed? It'd be great if Facebook could just go back to showing me posts by my friends. Not things they've liked, not things they've been tagged in, just what they've posted. All I want the Facebook feed to show me is posts from my friends, and events that my friends are going to.
I've taken the rather drastic step of unfollowing everyone just to get the utter garbage that is the feed out of my life.
Yeh 100%. The entire premise is that the social offering of FB is free (for the most part, of course users pay in data). I read an interesting article yday on why the 'free' offering of tech companies like FB allows them to thrive versus say an Uber-like tech company that has an explicit cost associated to it even though that is the delivery of a more tangible product i.e. getting from point a to b.
I absolutely would pay for it as Messenger and Events are both great products, but like you I know most people wouldn't and that they succeed because everyone uses them.
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.
Here in Europe messaging systems took off around year 2000 because they were free alternatives to SMSes. Network effects were small and people switched a lot. Those effects are huge now but I believe that if we had to start paying for Messenger or WhatsApp we would switch to something else, probably Telegram.
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.
They have a standalone app called Local but I was talking about events within the main app. Being able to easily see what my friends are doing each weekend and what else is on in my city is great (especially as we no longer have weekly street press).
The idea of replacing ads with direct payments isn't entirely new, and the reason for it failing far more often than not is that nobody is willing to spend what they represent in ad-value themselves.
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.
And that's sort of the problem with chasing as much revenue as possible and is why capitalism has been in the crosshairs for conversations on equity as of late.
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.
You oughta open a FB quarterly presentation some day, it is quite eye opening how off the charts they are in terms of user monetization. $20 yearly wouldn't cut it at all, in North America the average revenue per user (ARPU, trailing 12-months) is about $145 (yes, $145 * 253M monthly active users). It's not even enough to match the worldwide ARPU (about $29, for 2.6B users). The value FB extracts from it's users, particularly in NA, is simply astonishing, I'll leave you to Googling the ARPU of other web platforms to get an idea.
The where some numbers in 2016 saying that a US user was worth around $60 per year, EU users a little less (around $40). The users in the rest of the world is worth only a few dollars a year, if anything.
This is the thing that bugs me the most about the feed.
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.
Yes. I imagine, we would have hashtags, and algorithmic hashtags (in case your uncle stops using #rightWingConsiracy hashtab because everybody is filtering it?) and ability to filter by hashtags (with ability to selectively pick whether you block algorithmic hashtags, or normal hashtags). The problem I see is that your uncle might get offended that FB is marking his posts #rightWingConspiracy).
interestingly enough the average facebook user spends 60 minutes per day on the site. That's about two full weeks per year. If having to pay one dollar for the service isn't even worth it, that tells you something about how much people actually value their usage of facebook.
One of the simpler ways to fix social ills and misallocated resources is to utilize the price mechanism.
I believe this was a response to people interacting less with the feed and posting less about their own life.. its almost morphed into a reddit cross social feed now. And they're only expanding the bounds more and more, Facebook news if it takes off will also change this significantly once people start sharing more of that content.
I have a Facebook account, but rarely log in (maybe once every few months or so). I just logged in to check, and I don't see any news in the feed. The only thing I see are posts from old classmates and similar who still use Facebook.
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?
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.
I did it because when I activate incognito mode it disabled my extensions. The main reason for me doing that was that I wanted to make sure that it wasn't my adblocker that filtered it out.
> It'd be great if Facebook could just go back to showing me posts by my friends.
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.
I tried doing this but it seemed to just make the algorithm look harder and harder for new things to show me, so the quality of content actually reduced.
Yeah, the news articles and non-friend interactions killed the friend-to-friend interactions. It went from being an amazing, private social network to being the shittiest newsreader.
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.
I like that observation. The times when I was the most invested in YouTube and Reddit were both when I was having lots of arguments on the platform. Great food for thought.
I can't remember where I saw it, but someone described advertising driven social media as like a pub where they make their money from people having a fight by the front door rather than from selling beer.
I have done the same. I only follow people I could have a beer with. I have reached the end of my feed so many times. Now there are maybe 1-5 new posts a day. Nobody uses Facebook anymore.
Is 'logged in' a useful metric? You authenticated months or years ago and now every facebook widget on the internet counts as a 'logged in' event just because a cookie still exists?
Facebook (presumably in a dark pattern to make me install the app) has stopped showing me anything at all in my m.facebook feed. It's quite the relief actually, now I might actually be able to quit.
Before this they told me I would have to install the app to send and receive messages. After a month of using mbasic.facebook.com the m. messaging functionality returned.
Ah the message functionality in the mobile site has returned? All the removal did was successfully stop me from using Facebook on my phone at all (thanks, Facebook!). I will not be starting again.
This seems like the largest misconception of what FB is about. Your feed doesn't matter. We can all pretend to mass #deletefb, but you have already given enough data that they can carry it through all these "properties" without much loss.
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.
> This seems like the largest misconception of what FB is about. Your feed doesn't matter. We can all pretend to mass #deletefb, but you have already given enough data that they can carry it through all these "properties" without much loss.
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've taken the rather drastic step of unfollowing everyone just to get the utter garbage that is the feed out of my life.
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.
Events is something I can't give up, unfortunately. With the death of street press it's easily the best (and often only) way to find out about gigs and raves, and my friends organise events on facebook too.
This is a really good point. Events are really one of the bigger things I miss 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.
Assuming that publishers have functional RSS feeds, which is rarely the case. For small venues/companies/organizations I more and more often have to go to their Facebook page rather than their website to get up-to-date and correct information.
Quite the opposite. The benefit is getting Facebook's algorithm, instead of a reverse chronology. I never found any of the million apps that tried to accomplish this to actually mix the news better than fb.
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've made this suggestion because at first I didn't realise that you find FB's algorithmic sorting/curation useful. I tend to read (or at least skim) all of the content that I subscribe too and FB (and Twitter) are a bit hostile for this usecase.
Very few of my friends post anymore. For a while I thought it was the algorithm but I realized that most folks have just given up. It surprises me that their revenue keeps going up, but I’ve assumed it was just people outside my bubble.
I I get that the top 100 advertisers only make up 6% of revenue, but don’t they also have the effect of bidding up the prices on advertising on certain interests and locations?
I guess you’re assuming that having deep pockets they bid very high in certain areas?
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.
That is quite nice. These advertisers are basically advocated removing certain people outside the zeitgeist they want to cater to.
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.
Does brand advertising even work on FB? All these big brands pulling out seems like PR more than anything that is really going to hurt FB long term. Seems like the big money is in D2C and retargeting, which (AFAIK) is not cost effective for the big brand advertisers.
I think many observers are missing the point here. It is not merely that Facebook can weather the big spenders leaving their platform (which may also be true).
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.
> There will be far less outrage porn in a year or two
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 isn't hedging any bets, it's just not giving into the mob like behavior by the advertisers. Facebook knows that the advertisement dollars were anyways not going to be coming to FB due to the recession, and if they take a political stand at this moment, then they are inviting regulatory risks from the other side.
Facebook is staying neutral, and not giving into any pressure, mostly because Zuckerberg's job is safe and FB has plenty of cash!
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.
Yeah, I think a lot of the people who don’t think the ad boycott will be impactful are not taking into account how fb is just plain unpleasant to use now.
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.
Well to be more accurate I saw a moderator claim that any comment that mentions it gets flagged to him and even if he allows the comment, it will reappear in the moderation queue.
Is this actually true? I see that people claim this, but I have also seen people mention thedonald.win. It does seem like reddit's spam filter catches up if people keep posting the same link over and over.
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.
It would be interesting to know how they've built out this ontology. I'm sure they seeded it with something that they acquired from some company that specializes in this sort of thing.
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.
The "company that specializes in this sort of thing" is called... Facebook. They look at your friends and their listed birthdays to generate an ad category...
Facebook aren't infallible. Nearly every social media went parabolic growth so far. It's inherent to social media. It growths while the network effect encourages people to talk about it and join it, it wanes when interest fades and people you don't want to see end up there, and you grow tired of seeing them, and as people who you joined to socialize with leave, you leave too.
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.
GP also forgot about Snapchat, the one competitor that did not agree to be bought. Facebook, in response, just copied Snapchat features in Instagram, and waited them out. Because they could.
Facebook has a good message-distribution-thing going though. If you're a student, there's plenty of official and semi-official info-distribution via FB, WhatsApp etc. My local government uses FB more than their own Website. If you want to know whether you still have to wear a mask next week, you need to check FB. That's a strong value proposition, because you can opt out, but you're going to pay for it by not receiving information / receiving it delayed.
> it wanes when interest fades and people you don't want to see end up there
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.
I just wonder if some of these advertisers will notice if their brand advertising is even necessary when you're already household name. I also wonder if the boycotts will lower the cost of ads across the platform in general because you have less people competing for space.
Big brands need to spend quite a bit of money to keep the brand recognition going. That's why they spend what they spend on FB and also a few millions on 1 day events with limited reach but "high value".
It "works", but it really can't be analytically measured ( isn't that convenient? )
Consider the case of starbucks: I think the combination of people sticking to daily routines, ubiquitous store placement, and the headaches a heavy caffeine consumer gets when they stop will ensure their brand recognition stays high even when they no longer advertise on facebook.
Yes but most companies aren't in that business and don't have a giant billboard in every street corner in all cities ( at least it looks like it ).
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".
I don't really agree. Coke maintains its domination because it signs so many vendor agreements that keep out competition (Pepsi does the same,) and they are really good at it. I think a lot of ad spending that is all "brand" is largely a waste. There isn't really much good data to support it works if you're already massive, I think it's just something that has stuck with the industry, and since they can't really improve their margins anymore...throwing a few million at advertising is a business expense they can write off and it might have -some- effect does make sense. But, you could easily shift that budget to community outreach or whatever and it would probably have almost no negatives. I've worked with so many companies that get towards the end of the quarter and say "well, we have all this ad money, we've got to spend it before the quarter runs out!" They sometimes don't even care how it's spent, it just has to be spent. I really don't think brand advertising itself is the main driver of recognition once you reach a certain point. To be clear, I'm talking about brand only advertising. Product ads are different.
That’s a lot of cash to burn for nothing, supposedly though the goals of their brand advertising are building goodwill? At least according to this article
Honestly, Facebook weathered all their challenges quite well. I don't use Facebook, but compared to other social media sites they resisted pressure in the interest of their users, so kudos to Zuckerberg.
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...
They shouldn't be too cocky, all someone has to do is start a boycott campaign of companies still advertising on Facebook which might place pressure on those companies to drop off from Facebook. For these big companies, they might also be shocked if they notice no change in their sales after dropping off from Facebook.
no sub, so can't read, but do I need to? the reason is quite obvious.
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.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadFacebook 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'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.
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!
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.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+thedonald....
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 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...
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.