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Our startup spends a little bit on Facebook Ads (across FB, Instagram, etc). It's very clear over the past few months that there's trouble in the ads engine. At

Our startup spends a little bit on Facebook Ads (across FB, Instagram, etc). It's very clear over the past few months that there's trouble in the ads engine. Attribution is a mess, ad efficiency fluctuates randomly, the UI and API are flaky. I don't know whether this is a result of the ios privacy changes, the broader economy affecting ad spend, or internal issues... Maybe a mix. But it's clear that Meta's main revenue engine is a complete mess at the moment. PS it's not just us. We've seen industry-wide data showing that it's a broader issue.

TylerE 4y ago
They've gotten so damn greedy. On the mobile app literally over half my feed is ads.
- dangus 4y ago
  I don’t know if there’s any merit to this idea, but it seems to me that saturation can become a real problem. At this point skipping a story or feed ad in Instagram is like a nearly instant reflex for me. Plus, the programming on the recommendations is laughably amateur for company as resourceful as Meta. If I interact with an ad one time I’ll see the same ad over and over for days or weeks. Sure, I was curious for a second, but it seems strange that Meta can’t tell that I’m not interested anymore just by monitoring basic usage of the UI. At the end of the day the advertiser is the one left paying for these repeated ineffective ad impressions. Somewhat related, I am a little surprised Meta hasn’t tried a Discord-like revenue model where paid annual memberships bestow quality of life and cosmetic social status types of benefits. Even if it wasn’t their main source of revenue it could at least diversify the business and lend some stability to their revenue. Facebook’s revenue per user is less than $10. Discord charges $99/year for Nitro. I feel like Meta has such a one-track mindset on advertising that it doesn’t consider different revenue models for its businesses. Meta spends a lot of time talking about the metaverse but Discord is already the metaverse. Why isn’t there a subscription Meta Quest game pass with Discord-like social features? It’s a no-brainer. Where’s the “pro” paid version of Instagram? Why doesn’t Instagram sell subscription access to things like exclusive camera filters, stickers, and editing tools? I feel like the company is full of missed business opportunities.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Actually, that's a real thing advertisers DO want. It's called retargeting.
    - apendleton 4y ago
      > that's a real thing advertisers DO want I think GP is talking about a more specific thing, and it's one I experience all the time too: that I'll visit a website briefly one time, by accident, or to satisfy some curiosity, or look up the specifications on something I already own, or to get a link to send to a friend, or whatever other non-purchase reason, and then get shown ads for their thing over and over and over again until the end of time despite the fact that there's a 0% chance that I will ever buy it. I'm sure it's true that, in the general case, advertisers want to show ads to customers multiple times, but in these particular cases, they shouldn't want to show them to me -- I'm definitely not going to buy the thing, and they're wasting their money, and it seems like Facebook ought to be able to better differentiate between users like me who will definitely not convert and users who might (like GP said: seems like there ought to be detectable patterns in the way I do or don't engage with the content that should signal my lack of interest).
      - dangus 4y ago
        Exactly what I’m saying. I clicked or expanded something out of momentary curiosity. Maybe the ad was provocative or mysterious and I wanted to see what the deal was. Step two, I get retargeted. That’s fine and expected. Step three, I get retargeted. Again. And again…and again. What I don’t understand is how Meta/Instagram can’t figure out at least a little bit sooner that I was clearly just satisfying my curiosity and now every time I see the same ad I scroll by extra fast or otherwise interact in ways that should indicate disinterest.
        wikfwikf 4y ago
        People complain about this all the time. It is annoying, but it's not illogical. If you have looked at something once, say there's a 99% chance that you have no further interest in it. But the 1% chance that you are potentially going to buy it after being shown the ad again is still much better odds than showing it to a random person, or a random person who is somehow correlated to the target market. Even after seeing the ad 50 more times and ignoring it, you are probably still a statistically better lead than someone who has never interacted with the ad. They're not making a strong assumption about you, even though it seems that way. They're making a very weak assumption based on the small number of people who clicked once, hesitated, saw the ad 49 times more, carried on hesitating, and now are finally ready to buy.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  My feed is mostly not posts from people I know (for some reason it has started sending me tiktok length clips of standup comedians). Actually it is not so bad, some of the clips are pretty funny, but I could get that sort of content from tiktok or youtube I guess, I just happen to use the facebook app because it is already installed. Their fundamental advantage was network effect, I guess that is dead now that like 1/5 posts I see is from a friend.
  - passion__desire 4y ago
    People have stopped posting on facebook. That's the reason for increasing content from other sources.
    - Liuser 4y ago
      I suspect the reason why people have stopped posting is because of increasing content from other sources. It's definitely my reason. It's a negative feedback loop.
      - rurp 4y ago
        Yep, one of the main reasons I stopped using FB many many years ago was that they made it so hard to view the posts I actually cared about, and gave the user almost no control. It was clear at least a decade ago that FB didn't care about users and just saw them as chattel to squeeze for money.
  - sjm-lbm 4y ago
    My understanding is that this is the strategy: the network effect method for choosing what content you want (FB/Insta) is getting beat by the "algorithm determines what you are interested in" method for choosing what content you want, so Facebook is pivoting to the latter.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      Maybe Myspace should make a concerted push back into the space Facebook has I guess decided to vacate. It seems crazy to try and compete with Tiktok on their home turf, they sound to have a pretty competent implementation and Facebook has got to be about as nimble as a barge at this point.
- spike021 4y ago
  Meanwhile I constantly get ads for restaurants and other businesses almost everywhere but the state I live in (California). I routinely get ads for Boston, NY, Japan, Taiwan, Germany. I've been to NY and Japan but none of the other places. So I don't think it's using my previous locations.
  - beckingz 4y ago
    It's really hard to configure FB to target actual locations as opposed to people interested in those locations. You've been to NY, so you're interested in NY, so FB will make money fleecing restaurants in NY wasting their ad money on you.
  - oceanplexian 4y ago
    If you work somewhere like Facebook, this is totally unsurprising. There are probably thousands of engineers writing yet-another-framework and working on the 100th re-invention of the wheel for some random internal product that users will never see. The engineers actually solving business problems are almost always understaffed and under-appreciated, hence why the product sucks.
- pvarangot 4y ago
  I use it on the browser to check one or two groups and on my phone for events, it's a mess. On the groups I always want to check for the most recent posts because it doesn't have a lot of activity and besides countless things I've tried it always wants to show the posts ordered with its algorithm. It's also like: post AD post AD post AD I'm used to ads, I grew up watching cartoons and shows on prime time old airwaves TV and listening to music on Top 50 radio shows. This is worse. No other media is as bad as Facebook ad-wise and no other media is worse than what prime TV and radio where in the 90s. They devolved.
- erehweb 4y ago
  Is over half your feed is labeled "Sponsored", or are you looking at other things as ads?
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  49% ads, 49% content, 2% "news feed isn't available right now" if I scroll too far (a couple dozen screens). Been like this for ages.
stingraycharles 4y ago
What does it mean when attribution is a mess? Or efficiency fluctuating? Does this imply that Facebook is showing ads in places they should not be, because they have inventory they cannot sell?
- beckingz 4y ago
  Hard to confirm that your ads are converting, and wild daily/weekly fluctuations in return on ad spend.
- Ozzie_osman 4y ago
  > What does it mean when attribution is a mess? Attribution means being able to "attribute" a user and the conversions (eg signups, purchases, etc) they do back to your ad spend. So typically, advertisers want to be able to know that e.g. this ad campaign spent $100, led to 5 clicks, which led to 2 sign-ups and 1 purchase. Before the iOS privacy changes, Facebook could piece all those things together even though the ad might be running either on Facebook or another app, and the conversions are happening in your ad. Aka they could "attribute" the events back to the ad. With the new changes, Facebook can't put all those pieces together as easily, so they can either only do it on an aggregated basis (ie not user-by-user), and/or use probabilistic "modeling" to do attribution. This is good for users, since they are less likely to be tracked, but bad for advertisers who now cannot easily know how effective their ad spend is. > ... efficiency fluctuating Let's say one day you spend $1000 and get 100 purchases, that's $10 / purchase. A purchase nets $15 for you, so that is good ad spend. The next day, you spend $1000 and only get 50 purchases, so it's $20 / purchase and you are losing money on your ad spend. These numbers fluctuate a lot more wildly than they did in the past, and it seems to happen randomly, making it hard to commit to spending a certain budget. This is probably related to attribution, because Facebook uses a lot of Machine Learning to predict who to show an ad to, where to show it, etc based on past conversions. But if they can't really attribute past conversions, it's hard for their Machine Learning model to consistently get results.
boringg 4y ago
iOS privacy has killed facebook advertisements. Meta is dealing with it currently - so are all small businesses who relied on good conversion from their ad targeting that has gone to isht since then. Apple will probably fill in that void at some point they've got a lock on all that intelligence. I'm curious how long it will take and how they will manage to do it without stepping on privacy toes.
- tomrod 4y ago
  If Apple doesn't, it seems a bit insane to miss the opportunity. Note that I strongly dislike adtech as a business model, but my hat is off to their cunning marketing if Apple pulls it off.
  - creato 4y ago
    As much as I can’t stand any company involved here, if apple does what you suggest it would be far more offensive than any other supposed antitrust violations alleged over the last few years.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    They have an advertising platform already, right? Apple has been around for a while, they I wonder if the company has some institutional 'survival instinct' that's identified growing the ad platform become too much as long-term unhealthy. It is a corrupting influence that makes the consumer into the enemy, after all. They've also managed to become incredibly huge while somehow mostly dodging the eye of regulatory bodies. Privacy could mess with that track record and I'm sure they are aware of that fact.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > iOS privacy has killed facebook advertisements A problem I see with FB is that they don't control anything on which they run. They run on stuff from their competitors: it's either Google (Chrome / Android), Microsot (Windows / Edge) or Apple (OS X / Safari / iOS). Despite the downturn these three behemoths are still enjoying a market cap in the trillion+. Meta is actually down to $360 bn. Meta controls neither the OS nor the browser. They want to change that by having people switching en masse to the Metaverse but I'm really not sure this is happening.
rr888 4y ago
To me it looks like they tried to copy TikTok, with loads of ads and turned a decent product into something no one wants to use.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  They still dominate the Indian market simply because TikTok is banned here. While I don’t undermine the spying potential of TikTok, the ban was strangely timed - soon after a huge investment from Facebook in India’s biggest company (and one with tremendous lobbying power). Only a handful of Chinese apps were banned, even though majority of devices running them were Chinese as well (and went unbanned). Facebook very well would have lost the massive Indian market as well without the TikTok ban.
UnpossibleJim 4y ago
Do you think the Digital Markets Act in the E.U. had anything to do with this? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/technology/eu-regulation-apple-meta-google.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/technology/eu-regulation-...
- Gareth321 4y ago
  This hasn't gone into effect yet. When it does, it could expand Meta's ability to track users. If Apple is tracking users for ads, then they must extend that ability to third parties like Meta.
ssharp 4y ago
I haven't done much with Facebook ads since 2019, but back then the UI was a flaky, buggy mess. It was pretty terrible to work with. At one point they had a "Power Editor" and then a simpler ads interface. They combined these into one unified tool and it was pretty rough.
s1k3 4y ago
Our CPIs have been absurd ever since the privacy changes. Meta is fucked and I don’t think people realize how much of an effect this is going to have on the entire internet. There are large downstream effects the iOS privacy changes are having on mobile advertising and the viability of companies that rely on mobile programmatic to bring people in the door.
- sleton38234234 4y ago
  Take a look at the top 20 advertisers, by total amount spent. You'll see, it's almost entirely large companies that don't calculate any kind of ROI and thus are extremely insensitive to CPIs. Companies like Pepsi and Nike don't and can't calculate ROI, they just want to spend a certain number of billion dollars on ads, even if it's just to prevent competitors from having those ad slots. Now businesses, that do depend on a positive ROI on ad spend, in order to compete and survive: they are F*ked, sadly.
- seibelj 4y ago
  Somehow businesses marketed effectively before individualized ad tracking. I don’t think the world is going to end.
  - lmm 4y ago
    Some kinds of businesses did. But the current version of a tech startup didn't. No, the world won't end, but we could be looking at significant economic changes.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    Less business were able to. Personalized ads makes it so that more businesses are viable.
    - seibelj 4y ago
      Apple is a private company, they decided to limit the current mechanism through which adtech tracked people, and if people dislike it they can switch to more advertising-friendly devices. What I like about the current situation is everything is done freely - no law was passed to make Apple do it, nor make Meta use it. As consumers start understanding exactly how adtech works - and such education took decades - they are freely choosing devices that limit tracking, and when given the option to opt-out, are opting out at extremely high numbers. This tells you something about what consumers want. Businesses would be more viable if they learned to market through mechanisms that were less distasteful to consumers.
prakhar897 4y ago
As a user, FB is a hot mess rn so much so that I'm forced to switch to other apps. 8/10 posts are either sponsored or "suggested" by some random page. It's like watching 30 mins of ad to watch 1 min of video on youtube. When I instictively open the app, the first 10 posts (ads) help me in breaking the habit.

TylerE 4y ago

They've gotten so damn greedy. On the mobile app literally over half my feed is ads.

dangus 4y ago
I don’t know if there’s any merit to this idea, but it seems to me that saturation can become a real problem. At this point skipping a story or feed ad in Instagram is like a nearly instant reflex for me. Plus, the programming on the recommendations is laughably amateur for company as resourceful as Meta. If I interact with an ad one time I’ll see the same ad over and over for days or weeks. Sure, I was curious for a second, but it seems strange that Meta can’t tell that I’m not interested anymore just by monitoring basic usage of the UI. At the end of the day the advertiser is the one left paying for these repeated ineffective ad impressions. Somewhat related, I am a little surprised Meta hasn’t tried a Discord-like revenue model where paid annual memberships bestow quality of life and cosmetic social status types of benefits. Even if it wasn’t their main source of revenue it could at least diversify the business and lend some stability to their revenue. Facebook’s revenue per user is less than $10. Discord charges $99/year for Nitro. I feel like Meta has such a one-track mindset on advertising that it doesn’t consider different revenue models for its businesses. Meta spends a lot of time talking about the metaverse but Discord is already the metaverse. Why isn’t there a subscription Meta Quest game pass with Discord-like social features? It’s a no-brainer. Where’s the “pro” paid version of Instagram? Why doesn’t Instagram sell subscription access to things like exclusive camera filters, stickers, and editing tools? I feel like the company is full of missed business opportunities.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Actually, that's a real thing advertisers DO want. It's called retargeting.
  - apendleton 4y ago
    > that's a real thing advertisers DO want I think GP is talking about a more specific thing, and it's one I experience all the time too: that I'll visit a website briefly one time, by accident, or to satisfy some curiosity, or look up the specifications on something I already own, or to get a link to send to a friend, or whatever other non-purchase reason, and then get shown ads for their thing over and over and over again until the end of time despite the fact that there's a 0% chance that I will ever buy it. I'm sure it's true that, in the general case, advertisers want to show ads to customers multiple times, but in these particular cases, they shouldn't want to show them to me -- I'm definitely not going to buy the thing, and they're wasting their money, and it seems like Facebook ought to be able to better differentiate between users like me who will definitely not convert and users who might (like GP said: seems like there ought to be detectable patterns in the way I do or don't engage with the content that should signal my lack of interest).
    - dangus 4y ago
      Exactly what I’m saying. I clicked or expanded something out of momentary curiosity. Maybe the ad was provocative or mysterious and I wanted to see what the deal was. Step two, I get retargeted. That’s fine and expected. Step three, I get retargeted. Again. And again…and again. What I don’t understand is how Meta/Instagram can’t figure out at least a little bit sooner that I was clearly just satisfying my curiosity and now every time I see the same ad I scroll by extra fast or otherwise interact in ways that should indicate disinterest.
      - wikfwikf 4y ago
        People complain about this all the time. It is annoying, but it's not illogical. If you have looked at something once, say there's a 99% chance that you have no further interest in it. But the 1% chance that you are potentially going to buy it after being shown the ad again is still much better odds than showing it to a random person, or a random person who is somehow correlated to the target market. Even after seeing the ad 50 more times and ignoring it, you are probably still a statistically better lead than someone who has never interacted with the ad. They're not making a strong assumption about you, even though it seems that way. They're making a very weak assumption based on the small number of people who clicked once, hesitated, saw the ad 49 times more, carried on hesitating, and now are finally ready to buy.
bee_rider 4y ago
My feed is mostly not posts from people I know (for some reason it has started sending me tiktok length clips of standup comedians). Actually it is not so bad, some of the clips are pretty funny, but I could get that sort of content from tiktok or youtube I guess, I just happen to use the facebook app because it is already installed. Their fundamental advantage was network effect, I guess that is dead now that like 1/5 posts I see is from a friend.
- passion__desire 4y ago
  People have stopped posting on facebook. That's the reason for increasing content from other sources.
  - Liuser 4y ago
    I suspect the reason why people have stopped posting is because of increasing content from other sources. It's definitely my reason. It's a negative feedback loop.
    - rurp 4y ago
      Yep, one of the main reasons I stopped using FB many many years ago was that they made it so hard to view the posts I actually cared about, and gave the user almost no control. It was clear at least a decade ago that FB didn't care about users and just saw them as chattel to squeeze for money.
- sjm-lbm 4y ago
  My understanding is that this is the strategy: the network effect method for choosing what content you want (FB/Insta) is getting beat by the "algorithm determines what you are interested in" method for choosing what content you want, so Facebook is pivoting to the latter.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Maybe Myspace should make a concerted push back into the space Facebook has I guess decided to vacate. It seems crazy to try and compete with Tiktok on their home turf, they sound to have a pretty competent implementation and Facebook has got to be about as nimble as a barge at this point.
spike021 4y ago
Meanwhile I constantly get ads for restaurants and other businesses almost everywhere but the state I live in (California). I routinely get ads for Boston, NY, Japan, Taiwan, Germany. I've been to NY and Japan but none of the other places. So I don't think it's using my previous locations.
- beckingz 4y ago
  It's really hard to configure FB to target actual locations as opposed to people interested in those locations. You've been to NY, so you're interested in NY, so FB will make money fleecing restaurants in NY wasting their ad money on you.
- oceanplexian 4y ago
  If you work somewhere like Facebook, this is totally unsurprising. There are probably thousands of engineers writing yet-another-framework and working on the 100th re-invention of the wheel for some random internal product that users will never see. The engineers actually solving business problems are almost always understaffed and under-appreciated, hence why the product sucks.
pvarangot 4y ago
I use it on the browser to check one or two groups and on my phone for events, it's a mess. On the groups I always want to check for the most recent posts because it doesn't have a lot of activity and besides countless things I've tried it always wants to show the posts ordered with its algorithm. It's also like: post AD post AD post AD I'm used to ads, I grew up watching cartoons and shows on prime time old airwaves TV and listening to music on Top 50 radio shows. This is worse. No other media is as bad as Facebook ad-wise and no other media is worse than what prime TV and radio where in the 90s. They devolved.
erehweb 4y ago
Is over half your feed is labeled "Sponsored", or are you looking at other things as ads?
dpkirchner 4y ago
49% ads, 49% content, 2% "news feed isn't available right now" if I scroll too far (a couple dozen screens). Been like this for ages.

stingraycharles 4y ago

What does it mean when attribution is a mess? Or efficiency fluctuating? Does this imply that Facebook is showing ads in places they should not be, because they have inventory they cannot sell?

beckingz 4y ago
Hard to confirm that your ads are converting, and wild daily/weekly fluctuations in return on ad spend.
Ozzie_osman 4y ago
> What does it mean when attribution is a mess? Attribution means being able to "attribute" a user and the conversions (eg signups, purchases, etc) they do back to your ad spend. So typically, advertisers want to be able to know that e.g. this ad campaign spent $100, led to 5 clicks, which led to 2 sign-ups and 1 purchase. Before the iOS privacy changes, Facebook could piece all those things together even though the ad might be running either on Facebook or another app, and the conversions are happening in your ad. Aka they could "attribute" the events back to the ad. With the new changes, Facebook can't put all those pieces together as easily, so they can either only do it on an aggregated basis (ie not user-by-user), and/or use probabilistic "modeling" to do attribution. This is good for users, since they are less likely to be tracked, but bad for advertisers who now cannot easily know how effective their ad spend is. > ... efficiency fluctuating Let's say one day you spend $1000 and get 100 purchases, that's $10 / purchase. A purchase nets $15 for you, so that is good ad spend. The next day, you spend $1000 and only get 50 purchases, so it's $20 / purchase and you are losing money on your ad spend. These numbers fluctuate a lot more wildly than they did in the past, and it seems to happen randomly, making it hard to commit to spending a certain budget. This is probably related to attribution, because Facebook uses a lot of Machine Learning to predict who to show an ad to, where to show it, etc based on past conversions. But if they can't really attribute past conversions, it's hard for their Machine Learning model to consistently get results.

boringg 4y ago

iOS privacy has killed facebook advertisements. Meta is dealing with it currently - so are all small businesses who relied on good conversion from their ad targeting that has gone to isht since then. Apple will probably fill in that void at some point they've got a lock on all that intelligence. I'm curious how long it will take and how they will manage to do it without stepping on privacy toes.

tomrod 4y ago
If Apple doesn't, it seems a bit insane to miss the opportunity. Note that I strongly dislike adtech as a business model, but my hat is off to their cunning marketing if Apple pulls it off.
- creato 4y ago
  As much as I can’t stand any company involved here, if apple does what you suggest it would be far more offensive than any other supposed antitrust violations alleged over the last few years.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  They have an advertising platform already, right? Apple has been around for a while, they I wonder if the company has some institutional 'survival instinct' that's identified growing the ad platform become too much as long-term unhealthy. It is a corrupting influence that makes the consumer into the enemy, after all. They've also managed to become incredibly huge while somehow mostly dodging the eye of regulatory bodies. Privacy could mess with that track record and I'm sure they are aware of that fact.
TacticalCoder 4y ago
> iOS privacy has killed facebook advertisements A problem I see with FB is that they don't control anything on which they run. They run on stuff from their competitors: it's either Google (Chrome / Android), Microsot (Windows / Edge) or Apple (OS X / Safari / iOS). Despite the downturn these three behemoths are still enjoying a market cap in the trillion+. Meta is actually down to $360 bn. Meta controls neither the OS nor the browser. They want to change that by having people switching en masse to the Metaverse but I'm really not sure this is happening.

rr888 4y ago

To me it looks like they tried to copy TikTok, with loads of ads and turned a decent product into something no one wants to use.

spaceman_2020 4y ago
They still dominate the Indian market simply because TikTok is banned here. While I don’t undermine the spying potential of TikTok, the ban was strangely timed - soon after a huge investment from Facebook in India’s biggest company (and one with tremendous lobbying power). Only a handful of Chinese apps were banned, even though majority of devices running them were Chinese as well (and went unbanned). Facebook very well would have lost the massive Indian market as well without the TikTok ban.

UnpossibleJim 4y ago

Do you think the Digital Markets Act in the E.U. had anything to do with this? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/technology/eu-regulation-apple-meta-google.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/technology/eu-regulation-...

Gareth321 4y ago
This hasn't gone into effect yet. When it does, it could expand Meta's ability to track users. If Apple is tracking users for ads, then they must extend that ability to third parties like Meta.

ssharp 4y ago

I haven't done much with Facebook ads since 2019, but back then the UI was a flaky, buggy mess. It was pretty terrible to work with. At one point they had a "Power Editor" and then a simpler ads interface. They combined these into one unified tool and it was pretty rough.

s1k3 4y ago

Our CPIs have been absurd ever since the privacy changes. Meta is fucked and I don’t think people realize how much of an effect this is going to have on the entire internet. There are large downstream effects the iOS privacy changes are having on mobile advertising and the viability of companies that rely on mobile programmatic to bring people in the door.

sleton38234234 4y ago
Take a look at the top 20 advertisers, by total amount spent. You'll see, it's almost entirely large companies that don't calculate any kind of ROI and thus are extremely insensitive to CPIs. Companies like Pepsi and Nike don't and can't calculate ROI, they just want to spend a certain number of billion dollars on ads, even if it's just to prevent competitors from having those ad slots. Now businesses, that do depend on a positive ROI on ad spend, in order to compete and survive: they are F*ked, sadly.
seibelj 4y ago
Somehow businesses marketed effectively before individualized ad tracking. I don’t think the world is going to end.
- lmm 4y ago
  Some kinds of businesses did. But the current version of a tech startup didn't. No, the world won't end, but we could be looking at significant economic changes.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Less business were able to. Personalized ads makes it so that more businesses are viable.
  - seibelj 4y ago
    Apple is a private company, they decided to limit the current mechanism through which adtech tracked people, and if people dislike it they can switch to more advertising-friendly devices. What I like about the current situation is everything is done freely - no law was passed to make Apple do it, nor make Meta use it. As consumers start understanding exactly how adtech works - and such education took decades - they are freely choosing devices that limit tracking, and when given the option to opt-out, are opting out at extremely high numbers. This tells you something about what consumers want. Businesses would be more viable if they learned to market through mechanisms that were less distasteful to consumers.

prakhar897 4y ago

As a user, FB is a hot mess rn so much so that I'm forced to switch to other apps. 8/10 posts are either sponsored or "suggested" by some random page. It's like watching 30 mins of ad to watch 1 min of video on youtube. When I instictively open the app, the first 10 posts (ads) help me in breaking the habit.