17 ms·

Facebook hate-speech boycott had little effect on revenue

230 points by hhs 6y ago

rvz 6y ago
Obviously. Perhaps those companies in this 'boycott' did themselves a favour by saving money to get by the mounted losses due to the pandemic. Pausing advertising subscriptions to save some money rather than trying to pressurise Facebook to do a u-turn. This stunt changes absolutely nothing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gfosco 6y ago
  Considering this, was the tech and other media coverage of the "boycott" fair or accurate? Really looks like it was agenda-driven activism itself.
unreal37 6y ago
I really question what the real purpose of this "boycott" was during a pandemic. I've worked in advertising for 12+ years. I can easily imagine a company (say, Pepsi), deciding to pause a campaign they were planning to do because they figure the public are not in the mood to see advertising like that. And having nothing in the pipeline to replace it. So a "boycott" to the public is really just "we don't have much to say right now" in private. Also, "we need to save a few dollars because our quarterly profits have gone down." I don't think it was ever any "moral" boycott. It was just an excuse to cut ad spending for a few weeks and avoid being tone deaf during a BLM protest movement.
- tootahe45 6y ago
  For a lot of these businesses relying on foot traffic, ads would be futile anyway during widespread lockdowns. So really just free point-grabbing. This whole thing would've been avoided if Mark grew a pair and permanently banned the first companies who did this from ever using FB services again. I really hope he bans media companies who are trying to extort FB right now, the antics would be dropped quickly.
  - polyomino 6y ago
    That would be a terrible move. Nobody would want to work with a company that acts so childishly. It would also alienate all of the people who support the cause.
    - tootahe45 6y ago
      Facebook has not changed its policy with regards to hate speech as far as i'm aware, so these companies don't need to return to use FB services until it does. (Unless of course the protest was always meant as a 2 week gimmick at the expense of FB's reputation).
      - ss7pro 6y ago
        I hope those stupid compa ies would never come back to FB with their spending. Lack of blue chips on FB allowed SMBs to get cheaper ads on FB and their overall spending is bigger than blue chips so at the end FB benefited from this action. So those stupid companies are pu usher as their SMB competitors increases their market share!
        vageli 6y ago
        > I hope those stupid compa ies would never come back to FB with their spending. Lack of blue chips on FB allowed SMBs to get cheaper ads on FB and their overall spending is bigger than blue chips so at the end FB benefited from this action. So those stupid companies are pu usher as their SMB competitors increases their market share! Overall spending is bigger than blue chips? I feel like that's a citation needed. I've worked for companies spending 1 million+ on twitter advertising channel alone, so I'm curious how SMBs could get anywhere near close that level of spend in one channel per month forget about across multiple.
        sukilot 6y ago
        There are a lot more SMBs than Fortune 500s.
      - 6y ago
- darawk 6y ago
  This is exactly right. It was a way to get free advertising from cutting your advertising budget.
  - sharkweek 6y ago
    Two thoughts: One, I remember a study back when cigarette companies were told they couldn't advertise on television that all major tobacco brands loved this because it meant they didn't have to spend any money on these types of ads. I'm sure there are versions of this all over the place in most marketing strategies. Two, pardon my cynicism, but I'm sure companies model these things out and take action based on those models. No CEO is just like "yes, let's support a social cause." Randomly picking on a brand, but I'm sure Starbucks started flying a Pride Flag because it made sense to do so for the business.
    - cortesoft 6y ago
      It probably depends on the industry and market. For cigarettes, they weren’t trying to make people aware of cigarettes, because everyone already knows what they are. The companies were simply fighting for market share, and were at a point where they had to advertise just to keep their market share. It was a prisoners dilemma, where the whole industry could be more profitable by cutting advertising, but there was always an incentive to ‘defect’ and advertise your product. The government banning the ads solved this problem for them.
      - sukilot 6y ago
        The government taxes cigarettes within a nickel of affordability, so it's not really the cigarette companies who profited from this.
        thejynxed 6y ago
        You're correct, government in the USA and Australia for instance, is massively profit-taking via the taxes to the point that they are taking in more revenue per pack than the tobacco companies.
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  I wonder how that boycott was set up and effectively put in place: disabling facebook pixels ? suspend posting on fb pages ? fire community managers ? suspending contracts with ad companies that sell pepsi/others space on the net to advertise ?
  - 1123581321 6y ago
    Just pausing spend (stopping campaigns in the ad manager. Typically an agency would be told to suspend the campaign and relevant creative (copywriting, art assets) budgets would be paused or diverted to support other media.
    - johnchristopher 6y ago
      I see, hard to believe it was not just a PR and budget move then.
- adtechanon 6y ago
  Throwaway account from an established HN person. I work with many of the top advertisers in the US. These are not simply PR positions that take advantage of lower marketing expenditures. Many of the top advertisers do not support Facebook’s current advertising and content policies. Would you as a savvy marketer turn off your top 1 or 2 channel instead of lower performing channels? Facebook is typically in the top for both branding and performance media. Wouldn’t the marketing teams save money and maintain healthy performance by shutting down other channels? Facebook has a closed marketplace that protects itself, and gives malevolent actors (certain advertisers) the power to manufacture misinformation at a global scale. I have first-hand seen other channels soak up the FB funds during this time. It has been interesting to see the diversification into media that historically was not a major investment, because it under performed when compared to FB.
  - cheez 6y ago
    Sure.
  - ballenf 6y ago
    I believe your account, but I still wonder whether the opposition to FB is more about it having the power to upset the status quo and how that is a threat to these mega brands.
  - wolco 6y ago
    Is it the ad execs at company 1 & 2 calling the shots or is this a board level decision?
  - scarface74 6y ago
    How can you actually tell which brand advertising channel works? From what I know about the CPG market, they historically couldn’t tell except via coupons in newspapers.
  - cecja 6y ago
    For big brands social media advertising is just not that effective and for the agencies its a chore. Nobody likes it, nobody wants to do it and nobody sees a real effect on sales. For smaller brands it is an opportunity but if you have a market cap like coke or the exposure of nike there is nothing to gain, except some more numbers for your case study.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cm2012 6y ago
  I'm also a FB advertiser. Here my thoughts on it: 1) Facebook's reach is unique. If you want to share a message that's important to you with groups of people you care about reaching in the world, there's no better way to reach them at scale. 2) Facebook has had a number of negative sounding news cycles in the past few years (Cambridge Analytica, etc.), and data shows that the average American hasn't changed their behavior based on them. 70% of all Americans and Canadians use Facebook or Instagram at least once a month, and 55% of all Americans and Canadians use it at least once per day. Facebook's monthly and daily user counts have only grown, including this last quarter. 3) Very few advertisers ended up cutting spend during the boycott. Many who did so wanted to cut ad spend in a COVID environment anyway. For instance, Unilever and Coca-Cola also paused Twitter ads, which has nothing to do with the boycott. 4) I myself believe that, at least in comparison to other companies like Google, Facebook does try to police hate speech, and it's a hard job.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - wolco 6y ago
    1) Facebook is unique. But it is a costly way to reach a target group and usually the goal is to build other channels. Big brands are not looking to reach smaller targeted groups. 2) Daily users/monthly users is not really the stat worth tracking. That number was going to go up because of covid. I wonder about time spent on the site and time spent scrolling. That feels the important metric that has been dropping and tells a different story. 3) doesn't completely tell the story because if coke was cutting anyway that should show up 4) The differences on how each police hate speech doesn't really matter to anyone. The real reason is 5: 5) Facebook raised prices for everyone else.
    - nradov 6y ago
      I hardly saw ads for any big consumer brands on my Facebook feed even before the boycott. The vast majority of ads are from smaller companies. Not sure if my experience is typical?
- baryphonic 6y ago
  In my experience (not advertising), this is how most organizations operate. Even non-profit or government ones. If a firm is conspicuously not advertising, they'll get some organic press and maybe goodwill.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
opqpo 6y ago
>[S]ome seem to wrongly assume that most of the content on our services is about politics, news, misinformation or hate Of course Zucky!, most of the content is actually ads. Only boring content is allowed to make people scroll more and view more ads. It's the most mediocre money printer of all time. And what is actually the hate speech that's on Facebook? most of the hate speech is coming from the left so that doesn't count anyway. You can post about supporting ISIS but not about supporting Trump. What does the MSM want exactly? the Facebook gestapo already bans most people on the center and right. Should they visit everyone who isn't a BLM staunch supporter and kill them and their entire family to make the MSM happy?
- ouid 6y ago
  I'm sure you're about to get flagged, but you know ISIS is a decidedly right wing group, right?
  - opqpo 6y ago
    Are the western left and left liberals _really_ against ISIS? I think that would be racist.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    left/right completely falls apart when you apply it to groups like ISIS. They're decidedly not capitalist, which is strongly associated with "right wing", they run/ran their system on a religious taxation-scheme with a lot of "nationalization" of anything in conquered areas, but they're also not marxist in any way. They are obviously not nationalistic and are a diverse group, they are united by belief/ideology, not by blood/heritage. Declaring them to be "right wing" is obviously nonsense unless you remove all meaning and just call "right wing" whatever isn't explicitly left wing.
    - ouid 6y ago
      Well, sure, the notion of a total order on political ideologies is ridiculous, but if we are engaging in that silliness already, then the religious fanatics who insist upon their divine right to own women is pretty on the nose for comparison with other ideologies that describe themselves as right wing.
opqpo 6y ago
HN is a great place. Half the country voted for Trump but not a single one of them can show up here. Really makes you think.
DevKoala 6y ago
From my perspective tons of advertisers stopped spending in late Feb/March across multiple channels, not only Facebook. This was necessary for advertisers to re-evaluate how they would allocate their budget and change their messaging. Things are back in full force now. I get the feeling that some companies were just posturing with the Facebook boycott, and planned on decreasing their ad spending regardless.
- christophilus 6y ago
  This is it. It was nothing but a PR explanation of an already planned budget cut.
- autokad 6y ago
  also, I have never seen adds on facebook from most of those boycotting companies.
seibelj 6y ago
Could it be that the loudest and angriest twitter scolds actually represent ~0.0001% of the population and shouldn’t be immediately kowtowed to by our academic, cultural, and business leaders?
- CM30 6y ago
  Yeah, it's pretty much this in a nutshell. That's what is eventually going to shut down this whole 'cancel culture' issue, when people realise that the vocal minority screaming for someone's head on social media sites is pretty much irrelevant on a business level, and can be safely ignored.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Trader Joe’s reversed their initial reaction to cancel their kitschy labels of trader Giottos and Joe-san, etc.[1] “We do not make decisions based on petitions” [1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2020/07/31/trader-joes-says-no-to-changing-ethnic-sounding-label-names https://www.boston.com/news/business/2020/07/31/trader-joes-...
    - grawprog 6y ago
      >The petition posted on change.org by a high school student claims So that whole thing was over something a high school student originally posted? Not to generalize, but basing business decisions based on something a teenager posted on a website isn't necessarily going to lead to the best decisions.
      - sukilot 6y ago
        At what age does one's opinion matter? How old was the person who wrote in response "The packaging indicates it’s authentic to the country the recipe comes from!" ?
        avianlyric 6y ago
        From the perspective of a business? Probably the age you start buying their products. Not to be too cynical, but I doubt many companies give a damn what peoples opinions are, if those people aren’t buying their products, or if there isn’t a creditable threat those people will start to influence the opinions of people who do buy their products.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
o909 6y ago
Funny how half the country voted for Trump but not a single one can show up here and express a single opinion even in the most implicit way. You control all the big and small tech companies, online communities, all the big media except Fox and have your minions even inside the white house office yet still will lose miserably just like 2016.
ergocoder 6y ago
I don't understand why none pushes for a justice process for taking out hate speech and bad speech. Instead we are basically begging Facebook to be the one who makes this kind of judgement. Obviously, Facebook doesn't want to do that. Nobody wants to do that. I'm not talking about obviously blatant cases. I'm talking about a high profile one like Trump tweeting something bad. Even a senate/former lawyer like Elizabeth Warren doesn't ask for a due justice process. She is also screaming at Facebook to just take down Trump's posts. I imagine, if what Trump posts is extremely bad and illegal, it won't be hard to prosecute him or get a court order to ban or take down his posts. (Apology for inaccurate language usage. I'm not familiar with these legal terms. But I hope you get the main idea)
- justapassenger 6y ago
  Because it’s almost all politics and tribalism. Democrats complain that there’s not enough content take downs and republicans complain that there’s too much of it. No matter what internet companies do, they’ll face tons of criticism. And both sides think that they that support free speech. But free speech mean to them speech they agree with, and everything else is a hate speech.
  - hevelvarik 6y ago
    How does your characterization - that Democrats want more take downs and Republicans less - support or even comport with your contention that both sides claim interest in free speech
- quotemstr 6y ago
  The problem is that the speech that these people want censored isn't illegal. We have a strong constitutional prohibition against censorship. Many activists would prefer that we didn't have this prohibition, but they don't have the political clout to get it repealed --- rightly so, because despite everything that's happened, explicit censorship is very unpopular. Because the activists can't get the state to censor the public, activists have used increasingly underhanded tactics to get tech companies to censor the public. They've been very successful so far, but there's a growing resistance to their antics.
rhizome 6y ago
One month was always going to be too little. FB can ride it all out, and if I take a step back I wonder if they can be moved with financial attacks at all. I feel the greatest weaknesses they have, and which they can't defend against, are with reputation and MAUs.
- clusterfish 6y ago
  The twitter mob can boycott Facebook all they want, for a month or a year, but the vast majority of people and businesses will go on using it because that makes no difference to them. Boycotts are always limited in time and scope because if the product wasn't useful you wouldn't need to boycott it, you'd just ignore it in perpetuity. Like, I'm not "boycotting" natural fur clothing for the 20th year, I'm just not interested. Facebook is useful to both people and businesses and will continue to be useful regardless of any boycotts. Maybe not to some tiny minority of people, but to everyone else. There are tons of companies that survive with shitty business practices that have much weaker market position than Facebook.
  - rhizome 6y ago
    Well I don't think FB is so fungible as a market participant that they can be excused via relative privation[1]. They have close proximity to the lives of a lot of people, and the content that appears on their pages plays a prominent role in society, or at least the FB userbase. To be sure, sometimes its role in society is a result of splash damage. Facebook's grandeur is on display constantly, both in its expansive view of its business model competing against winking at someone on the bus, to the intransigence they express in resisting (if not refusing) any modification to their behavior. They're have toddler-mentality management, and it's a problem that the stock market rewards it. You don't have power over the fur industry by yourself. The purpose of boycotts is to spread, they aren't a state of being, and in your terms they could be said to be practice in ignoring something. "See? You can go without it." People and businesses still have MySpace pages, Friendster accounts, and all the kinds of powerless internet presence about which people like to say Facebook is immune, but the future isn't written yet. It stands to reason that Facebook could be the Penny Saver of the future, a webboard for people with online social inertia (I know of webboards that continue beyond decades with much more traffic than a lot of Facebook groups) and a place where yes, your business needs to put up a page. Facebook would love to be indispensible, and I wouldn't be surprised if they secretly want regulation (on their own terms, of course) because historically that is one method businesses can use to permanently implant themselves in the social fabric. Global reach complicates this, but with the TikTok controversy in the US right now[2], the world may wake up to regional restrictions on business access to individual nations (don't call it a Great Firewall) and we might wake up one day to find Facebook banned in the EU (for example) for their data practices. There are plenty of smaller social networks in the EU that don't have the problems FB does, and I don't think the users would miss anything more than being asked to friend a friend's friend that you met once (if at all). Everybody would know they have a month or three and in that time everybody sends everybody "I'm @abc123 on $somesite, and @xyz456 on $somesite2." Much easier than the old days of updating paper address books. And that's the illusion: that there's anything to miss, that it'll be difficult to maintain contact with people. All of the people you know online will still be online somewhere, and you know what? Email still exists. Facebook isn't indispensible. 1. https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relative-Privation https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relativ... 2. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/tiktok-ban-us-trump-why-will-it-happen-remove-app-what-countries-a9618931.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
bitxbit 6y ago
Expected since the uptick in ad money came from all the smid companies going full e-commerce as well as new categories such as masks.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Aren't Facebook ads essentially a perfect market (in the economic sense) if done properly? Even if someone drops out, there would be someone with a slightly lower bid just behind them.
- cowpig 6y ago
  Aren't they the farthest possible thing? There is literally one entity (Facebook) controlling the supply (human beings with dopamine addictions).
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    There is one supplier, but they almost function like a stock exchange or an auction house. You place per unit bids for actions/types of people and depending on what you bid, your ad gets shown to to different people. You would think that bids would eventually become quite economically efficient simply because of how easily conversion can be tracked.
- aaron695 6y ago
  That's a pretty interesting question. I would have said no. But I can't think why. Certainly Youtube and the other big monopolies behave like they are not a perfect market. Every now and again you'll see an article saying it's not known if advertising on the Internet even works that well. So the opinion is information around advertising is not really fluid enough, not sure in practice.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    The bit on internet advertising not working that well is interesting given that all the startups I know can tell you (to the cent) what it costs to acquire a customer. Perhaps that number provides a false sense of understanding and control and there is an information bias towards it over harder to analyze types of advertising such as radio, but it seems like the ROI for internet advertising would be the most clear.
    - 6y ago
sinsterizme 6y ago
I never understood the appeal of decentralized social media platforms until now. How does it make sense for large centralized platforms to police their platform for every little thing that the current social environment finds unacceptable? People should be able to organize themselves into groups as they see fit and no unilateral decision should have final say in a global community's thoughts and discussions
toephu2 6y ago
Does anyone here run ads on Facebook? How does the performance of the ads compare to Facebook's competitors? (Snapchat, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, etc)
george120 6y ago
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bigcloud1299 6y ago
This boycott generally is a signal to competitors that let’s not compete at this time where our revenue may impact. The competitors can’t have a meeting about it so this is how they signal each other. If the company competitors follow would mean you are both going maximize your profits e.g raise prices or not cut them via promotions. During the pandemic the sales of Pepsi and coke are already hurting due to commercial sales. Ad spend for say 5-6 months from Each might be as big as 100-200 million at best.
WhompingWindows 6y ago
Facebook has our attention, they built their platform to scale rapidly and hold our attention effectively. Now, they are a massive force with 9 million advertisers. 9 MILLION advertisers, all vying for the attention platform they have built.
jeremiahlee 6y ago
It takes two—advertisers and us using Facebook—in order for Facebook to make money. Advertisers are only on Facebook because we are on Facebook. Facebook won't change until people start leaving it. That's why I'm leaving it on September 1. I created a special page on my website and a drip marketing campaign for my friends on Facebook: https://www.jeremiahlee.com/posts/delete-facebook/ https://www.jeremiahlee.com/posts/delete-facebook/
- jeremiahlee 6y ago
  Why the downvotes?
nstart 6y ago
Look like Ben Thompson was right when he predicted the end outcome of this on Facebook's revenue [1]. He looked at the financials and noted that the real players on Facebook were the small companies looking to leverage the scale and automation of Facebook to pull customers away from the big players in ways that were never possible. He predicted that once the big players pulled out, automation would kick in, buying prices would be lowered, and spends by small players looking to take advantage of this would be more likely to go up. Fascinating to see how this has eventually played out. [1] https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-and-facebook/ https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-and-facebook/ (scroll down to "Facebook’s Anti-Fragility" to read the relevant section
DeonPenny 6y ago
Good, twitter ethics are illiberal and should be taken seriously. The big problem with ideas are who the judge is and it always tilts towards tyranny.
vanusa 6y ago
Facebook hate-speech boycott had little effect on revenue. You'll notice the article does a good job at mentioning related and mitigating factors (such as "growth was higher the the expectations of some analysts" and "there was also a slowdown in ad revenue due to the pandemic"). But it offers no data whatsoever to directly support its central claim: "The boycott had little effect on revenue". Then again, this wasn't a "news article" in the regular sense. Consider the site that it was hosted on, and their overall business model.

230 points by hhs 6y ago

rvz 6y ago

Obviously. Perhaps those companies in this 'boycott' did themselves a favour by saving money to get by the mounted losses due to the pandemic. Pausing advertising subscriptions to save some money rather than trying to pressurise Facebook to do a u-turn. This stunt changes absolutely nothing.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gfosco 6y ago
Considering this, was the tech and other media coverage of the "boycott" fair or accurate? Really looks like it was agenda-driven activism itself.

unreal37 6y ago

I really question what the real purpose of this "boycott" was during a pandemic. I've worked in advertising for 12+ years. I can easily imagine a company (say, Pepsi), deciding to pause a campaign they were planning to do because they figure the public are not in the mood to see advertising like that. And having nothing in the pipeline to replace it. So a "boycott" to the public is really just "we don't have much to say right now" in private. Also, "we need to save a few dollars because our quarterly profits have gone down." I don't think it was ever any "moral" boycott. It was just an excuse to cut ad spending for a few weeks and avoid being tone deaf during a BLM protest movement.

tootahe45 6y ago
For a lot of these businesses relying on foot traffic, ads would be futile anyway during widespread lockdowns. So really just free point-grabbing. This whole thing would've been avoided if Mark grew a pair and permanently banned the first companies who did this from ever using FB services again. I really hope he bans media companies who are trying to extort FB right now, the antics would be dropped quickly.
- polyomino 6y ago
  That would be a terrible move. Nobody would want to work with a company that acts so childishly. It would also alienate all of the people who support the cause.
  - tootahe45 6y ago
    Facebook has not changed its policy with regards to hate speech as far as i'm aware, so these companies don't need to return to use FB services until it does. (Unless of course the protest was always meant as a 2 week gimmick at the expense of FB's reputation).
    - ss7pro 6y ago
      I hope those stupid compa ies would never come back to FB with their spending. Lack of blue chips on FB allowed SMBs to get cheaper ads on FB and their overall spending is bigger than blue chips so at the end FB benefited from this action. So those stupid companies are pu usher as their SMB competitors increases their market share!
      - vageli 6y ago
        > I hope those stupid compa ies would never come back to FB with their spending. Lack of blue chips on FB allowed SMBs to get cheaper ads on FB and their overall spending is bigger than blue chips so at the end FB benefited from this action. So those stupid companies are pu usher as their SMB competitors increases their market share! Overall spending is bigger than blue chips? I feel like that's a citation needed. I've worked for companies spending 1 million+ on twitter advertising channel alone, so I'm curious how SMBs could get anywhere near close that level of spend in one channel per month forget about across multiple.
        sukilot 6y ago
        There are a lot more SMBs than Fortune 500s.
    - 6y ago
darawk 6y ago
This is exactly right. It was a way to get free advertising from cutting your advertising budget.
- sharkweek 6y ago
  Two thoughts: One, I remember a study back when cigarette companies were told they couldn't advertise on television that all major tobacco brands loved this because it meant they didn't have to spend any money on these types of ads. I'm sure there are versions of this all over the place in most marketing strategies. Two, pardon my cynicism, but I'm sure companies model these things out and take action based on those models. No CEO is just like "yes, let's support a social cause." Randomly picking on a brand, but I'm sure Starbucks started flying a Pride Flag because it made sense to do so for the business.
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    It probably depends on the industry and market. For cigarettes, they weren’t trying to make people aware of cigarettes, because everyone already knows what they are. The companies were simply fighting for market share, and were at a point where they had to advertise just to keep their market share. It was a prisoners dilemma, where the whole industry could be more profitable by cutting advertising, but there was always an incentive to ‘defect’ and advertise your product. The government banning the ads solved this problem for them.
    - sukilot 6y ago
      The government taxes cigarettes within a nickel of affordability, so it's not really the cigarette companies who profited from this.
      - thejynxed 6y ago
        You're correct, government in the USA and Australia for instance, is massively profit-taking via the taxes to the point that they are taking in more revenue per pack than the tobacco companies.
johnchristopher 6y ago
I wonder how that boycott was set up and effectively put in place: disabling facebook pixels ? suspend posting on fb pages ? fire community managers ? suspending contracts with ad companies that sell pepsi/others space on the net to advertise ?
- 1123581321 6y ago
  Just pausing spend (stopping campaigns in the ad manager. Typically an agency would be told to suspend the campaign and relevant creative (copywriting, art assets) budgets would be paused or diverted to support other media.
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    I see, hard to believe it was not just a PR and budget move then.
adtechanon 6y ago
Throwaway account from an established HN person. I work with many of the top advertisers in the US. These are not simply PR positions that take advantage of lower marketing expenditures. Many of the top advertisers do not support Facebook’s current advertising and content policies. Would you as a savvy marketer turn off your top 1 or 2 channel instead of lower performing channels? Facebook is typically in the top for both branding and performance media. Wouldn’t the marketing teams save money and maintain healthy performance by shutting down other channels? Facebook has a closed marketplace that protects itself, and gives malevolent actors (certain advertisers) the power to manufacture misinformation at a global scale. I have first-hand seen other channels soak up the FB funds during this time. It has been interesting to see the diversification into media that historically was not a major investment, because it under performed when compared to FB.
- cheez 6y ago
  Sure.
- ballenf 6y ago
  I believe your account, but I still wonder whether the opposition to FB is more about it having the power to upset the status quo and how that is a threat to these mega brands.
- wolco 6y ago
  Is it the ad execs at company 1 & 2 calling the shots or is this a board level decision?
- scarface74 6y ago
  How can you actually tell which brand advertising channel works? From what I know about the CPG market, they historically couldn’t tell except via coupons in newspapers.
- cecja 6y ago
  For big brands social media advertising is just not that effective and for the agencies its a chore. Nobody likes it, nobody wants to do it and nobody sees a real effect on sales. For smaller brands it is an opportunity but if you have a market cap like coke or the exposure of nike there is nothing to gain, except some more numbers for your case study.
deleted 6y ago
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cm2012 6y ago
I'm also a FB advertiser. Here my thoughts on it: 1) Facebook's reach is unique. If you want to share a message that's important to you with groups of people you care about reaching in the world, there's no better way to reach them at scale. 2) Facebook has had a number of negative sounding news cycles in the past few years (Cambridge Analytica, etc.), and data shows that the average American hasn't changed their behavior based on them. 70% of all Americans and Canadians use Facebook or Instagram at least once a month, and 55% of all Americans and Canadians use it at least once per day. Facebook's monthly and daily user counts have only grown, including this last quarter. 3) Very few advertisers ended up cutting spend during the boycott. Many who did so wanted to cut ad spend in a COVID environment anyway. For instance, Unilever and Coca-Cola also paused Twitter ads, which has nothing to do with the boycott. 4) I myself believe that, at least in comparison to other companies like Google, Facebook does try to police hate speech, and it's a hard job.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wolco 6y ago
  1) Facebook is unique. But it is a costly way to reach a target group and usually the goal is to build other channels. Big brands are not looking to reach smaller targeted groups. 2) Daily users/monthly users is not really the stat worth tracking. That number was going to go up because of covid. I wonder about time spent on the site and time spent scrolling. That feels the important metric that has been dropping and tells a different story. 3) doesn't completely tell the story because if coke was cutting anyway that should show up 4) The differences on how each police hate speech doesn't really matter to anyone. The real reason is 5: 5) Facebook raised prices for everyone else.
  - nradov 6y ago
    I hardly saw ads for any big consumer brands on my Facebook feed even before the boycott. The vast majority of ads are from smaller companies. Not sure if my experience is typical?
baryphonic 6y ago
In my experience (not advertising), this is how most organizations operate. Even non-profit or government ones. If a firm is conspicuously not advertising, they'll get some organic press and maybe goodwill.
deleted 6y ago
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opqpo 6y ago

>[S]ome seem to wrongly assume that most of the content on our services is about politics, news, misinformation or hate Of course Zucky!, most of the content is actually ads. Only boring content is allowed to make people scroll more and view more ads. It's the most mediocre money printer of all time. And what is actually the hate speech that's on Facebook? most of the hate speech is coming from the left so that doesn't count anyway. You can post about supporting ISIS but not about supporting Trump. What does the MSM want exactly? the Facebook gestapo already bans most people on the center and right. Should they visit everyone who isn't a BLM staunch supporter and kill them and their entire family to make the MSM happy?

ouid 6y ago
I'm sure you're about to get flagged, but you know ISIS is a decidedly right wing group, right?
- opqpo 6y ago
  Are the western left and left liberals _really_ against ISIS? I think that would be racist.
- luckylion 6y ago
  left/right completely falls apart when you apply it to groups like ISIS. They're decidedly not capitalist, which is strongly associated with "right wing", they run/ran their system on a religious taxation-scheme with a lot of "nationalization" of anything in conquered areas, but they're also not marxist in any way. They are obviously not nationalistic and are a diverse group, they are united by belief/ideology, not by blood/heritage. Declaring them to be "right wing" is obviously nonsense unless you remove all meaning and just call "right wing" whatever isn't explicitly left wing.
  - ouid 6y ago
    Well, sure, the notion of a total order on political ideologies is ridiculous, but if we are engaging in that silliness already, then the religious fanatics who insist upon their divine right to own women is pretty on the nose for comparison with other ideologies that describe themselves as right wing.

opqpo 6y ago

HN is a great place. Half the country voted for Trump but not a single one of them can show up here. Really makes you think.

DevKoala 6y ago

From my perspective tons of advertisers stopped spending in late Feb/March across multiple channels, not only Facebook. This was necessary for advertisers to re-evaluate how they would allocate their budget and change their messaging. Things are back in full force now. I get the feeling that some companies were just posturing with the Facebook boycott, and planned on decreasing their ad spending regardless.

christophilus 6y ago
This is it. It was nothing but a PR explanation of an already planned budget cut.
autokad 6y ago
also, I have never seen adds on facebook from most of those boycotting companies.

seibelj 6y ago

Could it be that the loudest and angriest twitter scolds actually represent ~0.0001% of the population and shouldn’t be immediately kowtowed to by our academic, cultural, and business leaders?

CM30 6y ago
Yeah, it's pretty much this in a nutshell. That's what is eventually going to shut down this whole 'cancel culture' issue, when people realise that the vocal minority screaming for someone's head on social media sites is pretty much irrelevant on a business level, and can be safely ignored.
- mc32 6y ago
  Trader Joe’s reversed their initial reaction to cancel their kitschy labels of trader Giottos and Joe-san, etc.[1] “We do not make decisions based on petitions” [1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2020/07/31/trader-joes-says-no-to-changing-ethnic-sounding-label-names https://www.boston.com/news/business/2020/07/31/trader-joes-...
  - grawprog 6y ago
    >The petition posted on change.org by a high school student claims So that whole thing was over something a high school student originally posted? Not to generalize, but basing business decisions based on something a teenager posted on a website isn't necessarily going to lead to the best decisions.
    - sukilot 6y ago
      At what age does one's opinion matter? How old was the person who wrote in response "The packaging indicates it’s authentic to the country the recipe comes from!" ?
      - avianlyric 6y ago
        From the perspective of a business? Probably the age you start buying their products. Not to be too cynical, but I doubt many companies give a damn what peoples opinions are, if those people aren’t buying their products, or if there isn’t a creditable threat those people will start to influence the opinions of people who do buy their products.

deleted 6y ago

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o909 6y ago

Funny how half the country voted for Trump but not a single one can show up here and express a single opinion even in the most implicit way. You control all the big and small tech companies, online communities, all the big media except Fox and have your minions even inside the white house office yet still will lose miserably just like 2016.

ergocoder 6y ago

I don't understand why none pushes for a justice process for taking out hate speech and bad speech. Instead we are basically begging Facebook to be the one who makes this kind of judgement. Obviously, Facebook doesn't want to do that. Nobody wants to do that. I'm not talking about obviously blatant cases. I'm talking about a high profile one like Trump tweeting something bad. Even a senate/former lawyer like Elizabeth Warren doesn't ask for a due justice process. She is also screaming at Facebook to just take down Trump's posts. I imagine, if what Trump posts is extremely bad and illegal, it won't be hard to prosecute him or get a court order to ban or take down his posts. (Apology for inaccurate language usage. I'm not familiar with these legal terms. But I hope you get the main idea)

justapassenger 6y ago
Because it’s almost all politics and tribalism. Democrats complain that there’s not enough content take downs and republicans complain that there’s too much of it. No matter what internet companies do, they’ll face tons of criticism. And both sides think that they that support free speech. But free speech mean to them speech they agree with, and everything else is a hate speech.
- hevelvarik 6y ago
  How does your characterization - that Democrats want more take downs and Republicans less - support or even comport with your contention that both sides claim interest in free speech
quotemstr 6y ago
The problem is that the speech that these people want censored isn't illegal. We have a strong constitutional prohibition against censorship. Many activists would prefer that we didn't have this prohibition, but they don't have the political clout to get it repealed --- rightly so, because despite everything that's happened, explicit censorship is very unpopular. Because the activists can't get the state to censor the public, activists have used increasingly underhanded tactics to get tech companies to censor the public. They've been very successful so far, but there's a growing resistance to their antics.

rhizome 6y ago

One month was always going to be too little. FB can ride it all out, and if I take a step back I wonder if they can be moved with financial attacks at all. I feel the greatest weaknesses they have, and which they can't defend against, are with reputation and MAUs.

clusterfish 6y ago
The twitter mob can boycott Facebook all they want, for a month or a year, but the vast majority of people and businesses will go on using it because that makes no difference to them. Boycotts are always limited in time and scope because if the product wasn't useful you wouldn't need to boycott it, you'd just ignore it in perpetuity. Like, I'm not "boycotting" natural fur clothing for the 20th year, I'm just not interested. Facebook is useful to both people and businesses and will continue to be useful regardless of any boycotts. Maybe not to some tiny minority of people, but to everyone else. There are tons of companies that survive with shitty business practices that have much weaker market position than Facebook.
- rhizome 6y ago
  Well I don't think FB is so fungible as a market participant that they can be excused via relative privation[1]. They have close proximity to the lives of a lot of people, and the content that appears on their pages plays a prominent role in society, or at least the FB userbase. To be sure, sometimes its role in society is a result of splash damage. Facebook's grandeur is on display constantly, both in its expansive view of its business model competing against winking at someone on the bus, to the intransigence they express in resisting (if not refusing) any modification to their behavior. They're have toddler-mentality management, and it's a problem that the stock market rewards it. You don't have power over the fur industry by yourself. The purpose of boycotts is to spread, they aren't a state of being, and in your terms they could be said to be practice in ignoring something. "See? You can go without it." People and businesses still have MySpace pages, Friendster accounts, and all the kinds of powerless internet presence about which people like to say Facebook is immune, but the future isn't written yet. It stands to reason that Facebook could be the Penny Saver of the future, a webboard for people with online social inertia (I know of webboards that continue beyond decades with much more traffic than a lot of Facebook groups) and a place where yes, your business needs to put up a page. Facebook would love to be indispensible, and I wouldn't be surprised if they secretly want regulation (on their own terms, of course) because historically that is one method businesses can use to permanently implant themselves in the social fabric. Global reach complicates this, but with the TikTok controversy in the US right now[2], the world may wake up to regional restrictions on business access to individual nations (don't call it a Great Firewall) and we might wake up one day to find Facebook banned in the EU (for example) for their data practices. There are plenty of smaller social networks in the EU that don't have the problems FB does, and I don't think the users would miss anything more than being asked to friend a friend's friend that you met once (if at all). Everybody would know they have a month or three and in that time everybody sends everybody "I'm @abc123 on $somesite, and @xyz456 on $somesite2." Much easier than the old days of updating paper address books. And that's the illusion: that there's anything to miss, that it'll be difficult to maintain contact with people. All of the people you know online will still be online somewhere, and you know what? Email still exists. Facebook isn't indispensible. 1. https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relative-Privation https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relativ... 2. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/tiktok-ban-us-trump-why-will-it-happen-remove-app-what-countries-a9618931.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

bitxbit 6y ago

Expected since the uptick in ad money came from all the smid companies going full e-commerce as well as new categories such as masks.

MattGaiser 6y ago

Aren't Facebook ads essentially a perfect market (in the economic sense) if done properly? Even if someone drops out, there would be someone with a slightly lower bid just behind them.

cowpig 6y ago
Aren't they the farthest possible thing? There is literally one entity (Facebook) controlling the supply (human beings with dopamine addictions).
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  There is one supplier, but they almost function like a stock exchange or an auction house. You place per unit bids for actions/types of people and depending on what you bid, your ad gets shown to to different people. You would think that bids would eventually become quite economically efficient simply because of how easily conversion can be tracked.
aaron695 6y ago
That's a pretty interesting question. I would have said no. But I can't think why. Certainly Youtube and the other big monopolies behave like they are not a perfect market. Every now and again you'll see an article saying it's not known if advertising on the Internet even works that well. So the opinion is information around advertising is not really fluid enough, not sure in practice.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  The bit on internet advertising not working that well is interesting given that all the startups I know can tell you (to the cent) what it costs to acquire a customer. Perhaps that number provides a false sense of understanding and control and there is an information bias towards it over harder to analyze types of advertising such as radio, but it seems like the ROI for internet advertising would be the most clear.
  - 6y ago

sinsterizme 6y ago

I never understood the appeal of decentralized social media platforms until now. How does it make sense for large centralized platforms to police their platform for every little thing that the current social environment finds unacceptable? People should be able to organize themselves into groups as they see fit and no unilateral decision should have final say in a global community's thoughts and discussions

toephu2 6y ago

Does anyone here run ads on Facebook? How does the performance of the ads compare to Facebook's competitors? (Snapchat, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, etc)

george120 6y ago

https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/07/hack-my-maths.html https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/07/hack-my-maths.html How To Hack My Maths Hello guys and welcome to a new post how to hack my maths this is going to be the first article of all the ones I've done on here and these are for actual. Natural quizzes not just for games, so the first thing you'll need is Firefox Programs. It's just Firefox, so the first thing that you want to do is you're going to click on the test you want to do so I'm only on practice here. Still, it works on homework two it's let's say I want to do this one click on it and try the homework or the worksheet and it should load up now what you're going to do is work out or work out one of them, so you want to find the easiest one and then yeah work it out so I'm going to do I don't. 540 times 96 and you're just going to work out you need to get one correct so 5 1 8 Okay so now that you've worked one out are you going to let market and bend or you're going to need to do now is press control-shift die and that should open. Up the developer tools if that doesn't work click on the three tools web developer and then I think it was inspector no double tools and then that will open it okay so if you're not. Already click over to the Network tab and leave on there and you can drag that to the side or put it down minimize it whatever you want to do so now what you're going to do is mark every question, but you need to make sure you get at least one correct on one of them. So this is my one and then market okay so now you should see a load of these things popping up and what you want to do is put it in full screen actually, and we want to check the mark, so the mark is the final sort of saving the mark sort of thing, so you want that one now we don't want it to send what our work is. We want to send our modified work so we're going to left-click it and then click Edit and resend and you'll see all. These and you'll see this now we want to you based change the score so it's this yes the school we want to change so let's do that here so you should see this is at the bottom of it that we want to change and you should keep ongoing. Until you see q1 score and right now that's 0. Still, you don't want it to be 0 we want it to be like our thing, so you want to look so we're going to look on the right we're going to look on the first question, and it's out of 14 so now that, were on here question one score equals going to change that from zero to fourteen and then we're going to do that with question two. So we've got one out of twelve on that one it won't work if you don't get one wrong. So question two score is equal to the one we're going to change it to 12 questions three. Score it is equal to we want to question three to be equal to 12 so let's do that and then question four is six, so we want to make that equal to six it's a question four score is equal to six. Now if you don't get one right then it will not work, and if you don't see this green then it will not work either, and it only works with the top score so you can't like change this it only works with the head store you can't give yourself 110 per cent for example and then click send and mine's gone. Green so my pants work so now let's close that, and now this is all marked and everything we can go also we can go back, and it should go because we've done. It and then when we have gone to scores calculation which is the one we just did you got a hundred per cent and trust me, this works on everything these are all. The ones I've done but yeah now in some cases like on this one here the actual if like the exact things so question. Three scores didn't have anything, so it didn't have a value after it that's because you've got zero so you need to make sure to put something in there, And don't delete anything so yeah this will be the final my maths hack of the series I think this is the best one is, It's my homework, and it makes everything so much easy. I will let you know if it's patched, I'll put it in the title, but it's virtually untouchable so yeah. https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/07/hack-my-maths.html https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/07/hack-my-maths.html

bigcloud1299 6y ago

This boycott generally is a signal to competitors that let’s not compete at this time where our revenue may impact. The competitors can’t have a meeting about it so this is how they signal each other. If the company competitors follow would mean you are both going maximize your profits e.g raise prices or not cut them via promotions. During the pandemic the sales of Pepsi and coke are already hurting due to commercial sales. Ad spend for say 5-6 months from Each might be as big as 100-200 million at best.

WhompingWindows 6y ago

Facebook has our attention, they built their platform to scale rapidly and hold our attention effectively. Now, they are a massive force with 9 million advertisers. 9 MILLION advertisers, all vying for the attention platform they have built.

jeremiahlee 6y ago

It takes two—advertisers and us using Facebook—in order for Facebook to make money. Advertisers are only on Facebook because we are on Facebook. Facebook won't change until people start leaving it. That's why I'm leaving it on September 1. I created a special page on my website and a drip marketing campaign for my friends on Facebook: https://www.jeremiahlee.com/posts/delete-facebook/ https://www.jeremiahlee.com/posts/delete-facebook/

jeremiahlee 6y ago
Why the downvotes?

nstart 6y ago

Look like Ben Thompson was right when he predicted the end outcome of this on Facebook's revenue [1]. He looked at the financials and noted that the real players on Facebook were the small companies looking to leverage the scale and automation of Facebook to pull customers away from the big players in ways that were never possible. He predicted that once the big players pulled out, automation would kick in, buying prices would be lowered, and spends by small players looking to take advantage of this would be more likely to go up. Fascinating to see how this has eventually played out. [1] https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-and-facebook/ https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-and-facebook/ (scroll down to "Facebook’s Anti-Fragility" to read the relevant section

DeonPenny 6y ago

Good, twitter ethics are illiberal and should be taken seriously. The big problem with ideas are who the judge is and it always tilts towards tyranny.

vanusa 6y ago

Facebook hate-speech boycott had little effect on revenue. You'll notice the article does a good job at mentioning related and mitigating factors (such as "growth was higher the the expectations of some analysts" and "there was also a slowdown in ad revenue due to the pandemic"). But it offers no data whatsoever to directly support its central claim: "The boycott had little effect on revenue". Then again, this wasn't a "news article" in the regular sense. Consider the site that it was hosted on, and their overall business model.