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Facebook should just start charging users that don't consent to tracking for targeted advertising. Etc. Problem solved, and we, the shareholders, will hopefully

Facebook should just start charging users that don't consent to tracking for targeted advertising. Etc. Problem solved, and we, the shareholders, will hopefully be happy too. It's been truly shit to own Facebook stock the last year.. Let's end this now and get back to writing the growth story. Please.

mxkopy 4y ago
Imagine writing something like this unironically and not immediately wanting to die of embarrassment Excuse me, 'growth story'? For Facebook ?? Time proves the shareholders vs. rest of society stereotype to be true, I guess
- QuietWatchtower 4y ago
  Right? I can't tell if this guy is being ironic or not lol
dangrossman 4y ago
I doubt that works economically. The money advertisers can pay Facebook is, essentially, a percentage of all consumer spending. A percentage of the money you pay for toilet paper, dish soap, groceries, car insurance, credit cards, etc is funding the advertising budgets of those companies. The money consumers can pay Facebook is, at most, some portion of their discretionary spending budget. What's left over after buying all that stuff, and paying the rest of their bills (housing, fuel, taxes, etc). The first number is a much bigger number than the second. If Facebook is no longer able to capture Charmin's ad spend because they can no longer provide adequate targeting, then Facebook will no longer get that money. The Charmin customers don't have it to send to Facebook directly, they gave it to Charmin to buy their toilet paper.
- sagarm 4y ago
  Charmin is likely doing brand advertising, however, and Facebook's ad network will likely still have greater demographic-targeted reach than other options. If nobody is allowed to build a demographic profile for cross-site cookies, the biggest negative impact will be to small sites. Previously their ad inventory could be relatively high value because it could be assigned targeted ads at scale, without site-specific work or having to trust the site itself. Now the site will at best self-report their user demographics. (1) they probably have poor visibility into their customer demo without something like Google Analytics to guide them and (2) it's difficult for a third party to verify any demographic composition they claim. Ad targeting on these will likely be content based. I suspect this inventory mostly won't be eligible for lucrative display advertising anymore, if it was before.
revskill 4y ago
The free market is never wrong ? The stock price is always true value.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Efficient Market Hypothesis isn't all that great. Arbitrage can and does exist over extended periods of time.
rndmio 4y ago
Out of interest where do you see growth coming from for Facebook? How many more people are there to get as users? Their advertising business is being hurt and likely to face further issues. The meta verse is, as yet, going nowhere.
Fargren 4y ago
I'm not totally sure that's allowed under GDPR. I know you can't say "consent to data collection or you can't use the website" [1]. So I doubt "consent to data collection OR PAY or you can't use the website" is acceptable. [1] unless the data is needed for the website to work
- JacobSeated 4y ago
  The GDPR has failed to reach a balanced approach to the issues from the start. They failed to account for missing and much needed technology (uniform, automatic and consistent consent mechanisms), and failed considering anonymization technology used to deliver targeted ads. The most profound mistake is their lack of proper risk assessment, as well as proof and transparent documentation of real actual significant harm done to users, to warrant such discriminating privacy laws. In the process they are hurting everyone, including small personal blogs, news media sites, and large social media sites. The data, if hacked, or spied on by employees, is still a privacy risk regardless if its used for targeting ads or not. The data still sits on the servers, because the applications depend on it to function properly. The number of ecommerce websites alone that do not properly handle personal data is scary; basically anyone with database access can also access all the personal data on customers. If a given CMS has a known exploit, then the data is in great risk of being leaked and abused. E.g. Never host a site on Wordpress without proper security in place. Nevertheless. We should always maintain that the user is ultimately responsible. If they do not like Facebook, they just ought NOT to create a Facebook account. Dislike being watched when walking around in physical shops? Stay away from them. However, the actual risk to the individual user, from ads, is so miniscule that we practically have no substantive examples of harm done. The worst shit is falsehoods promoted via ads, but that is purely an policy/moderation problem. Fake pages and accounts are a much bigger problem than falsehoods promoted via ads. Having a paid subscription model would be a valid opt-out of advertising (ads are often dishonest, so I would like to see that). The problem is, the data still sits on servers, and if leaked, this will, unlike targeted ads, pose an actual real risk of harm. I am not against the GDPR or the EU, but it has been profoundly flawed from the beginning, costing website owners a lot of time and money trying to comply. I absolutely hate consent platforms, because they are just another third party dependency IMO...
- 4y ago
occamrazor 4y ago
It’s not that simple, because of adverse selection. I wrote another comment about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33924689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33924689
p0pcult 4y ago
Or, let's just kill FB.
alkonaut 4y ago
Facebook would need to charge too much. This is the problem. They invented a way of extracting so many dollars per user-months in ads that they can’t have users pay for it instead because it’s too expensive. And the reason they do it so well is because they are so invasive to peoples integrity that if people find out - they’d also quit the service in droves, and it’s also so invasive that regulators are objecting. I don’t see Facebook returning to growth any time soon.
epolanski 4y ago
It's delusional to think people are gonna pay for services like IG, FB and Whatsapp which are already slowly dying even for free.

mxkopy 4y ago

Imagine writing something like this unironically and not immediately wanting to die of embarrassment Excuse me, 'growth story'? For Facebook ?? Time proves the shareholders vs. rest of society stereotype to be true, I guess

QuietWatchtower 4y ago
Right? I can't tell if this guy is being ironic or not lol

dangrossman 4y ago

I doubt that works economically. The money advertisers can pay Facebook is, essentially, a percentage of all consumer spending. A percentage of the money you pay for toilet paper, dish soap, groceries, car insurance, credit cards, etc is funding the advertising budgets of those companies. The money consumers can pay Facebook is, at most, some portion of their discretionary spending budget. What's left over after buying all that stuff, and paying the rest of their bills (housing, fuel, taxes, etc). The first number is a much bigger number than the second. If Facebook is no longer able to capture Charmin's ad spend because they can no longer provide adequate targeting, then Facebook will no longer get that money. The Charmin customers don't have it to send to Facebook directly, they gave it to Charmin to buy their toilet paper.

sagarm 4y ago
Charmin is likely doing brand advertising, however, and Facebook's ad network will likely still have greater demographic-targeted reach than other options. If nobody is allowed to build a demographic profile for cross-site cookies, the biggest negative impact will be to small sites. Previously their ad inventory could be relatively high value because it could be assigned targeted ads at scale, without site-specific work or having to trust the site itself. Now the site will at best self-report their user demographics. (1) they probably have poor visibility into their customer demo without something like Google Analytics to guide them and (2) it's difficult for a third party to verify any demographic composition they claim. Ad targeting on these will likely be content based. I suspect this inventory mostly won't be eligible for lucrative display advertising anymore, if it was before.

revskill 4y ago

The free market is never wrong ? The stock price is always true value.

tomrod 4y ago
Efficient Market Hypothesis isn't all that great. Arbitrage can and does exist over extended periods of time.

rndmio 4y ago

Out of interest where do you see growth coming from for Facebook? How many more people are there to get as users? Their advertising business is being hurt and likely to face further issues. The meta verse is, as yet, going nowhere.

Fargren 4y ago

I'm not totally sure that's allowed under GDPR. I know you can't say "consent to data collection or you can't use the website" [1]. So I doubt "consent to data collection OR PAY or you can't use the website" is acceptable. [1] unless the data is needed for the website to work

JacobSeated 4y ago
The GDPR has failed to reach a balanced approach to the issues from the start. They failed to account for missing and much needed technology (uniform, automatic and consistent consent mechanisms), and failed considering anonymization technology used to deliver targeted ads. The most profound mistake is their lack of proper risk assessment, as well as proof and transparent documentation of real actual significant harm done to users, to warrant such discriminating privacy laws. In the process they are hurting everyone, including small personal blogs, news media sites, and large social media sites. The data, if hacked, or spied on by employees, is still a privacy risk regardless if its used for targeting ads or not. The data still sits on the servers, because the applications depend on it to function properly. The number of ecommerce websites alone that do not properly handle personal data is scary; basically anyone with database access can also access all the personal data on customers. If a given CMS has a known exploit, then the data is in great risk of being leaked and abused. E.g. Never host a site on Wordpress without proper security in place. Nevertheless. We should always maintain that the user is ultimately responsible. If they do not like Facebook, they just ought NOT to create a Facebook account. Dislike being watched when walking around in physical shops? Stay away from them. However, the actual risk to the individual user, from ads, is so miniscule that we practically have no substantive examples of harm done. The worst shit is falsehoods promoted via ads, but that is purely an policy/moderation problem. Fake pages and accounts are a much bigger problem than falsehoods promoted via ads. Having a paid subscription model would be a valid opt-out of advertising (ads are often dishonest, so I would like to see that). The problem is, the data still sits on servers, and if leaked, this will, unlike targeted ads, pose an actual real risk of harm. I am not against the GDPR or the EU, but it has been profoundly flawed from the beginning, costing website owners a lot of time and money trying to comply. I absolutely hate consent platforms, because they are just another third party dependency IMO...
4y ago

occamrazor 4y ago

It’s not that simple, because of adverse selection. I wrote another comment about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33924689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33924689

p0pcult 4y ago

Or, let's just kill FB.

alkonaut 4y ago

Facebook would need to charge too much. This is the problem. They invented a way of extracting so many dollars per user-months in ads that they can’t have users pay for it instead because it’s too expensive. And the reason they do it so well is because they are so invasive to peoples integrity that if people find out - they’d also quit the service in droves, and it’s also so invasive that regulators are objecting. I don’t see Facebook returning to growth any time soon.

epolanski 4y ago

It's delusional to think people are gonna pay for services like IG, FB and Whatsapp which are already slowly dying even for free.