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I listened to the Meta investor call that forms the bulk of the article and for what it's worth, Zuckerberg framed the low monetization as a conscious part of t
by vagabund 4y ago
I listened to the Meta investor call that forms the bulk of the article and for what it's worth, Zuckerberg framed the low monetization as a conscious part of their product strategy -- that they spend long periods refining the experience with little consideration of ad revenue, and then only afterwards, as a somewhat separate endeavor, begin to investigate ways to monetize efficiently. They've been hugely successful rolling out successive products/experiences in this manner.
A lot of the perceived gap between short-form video and other social media's profitability can likely just be explained by TikTok's relatively nascent ad platform -- you could substitute TikTok with Twitter and make the case that it's text-based social apps that are worse ad businesses. My guess is it's more about the ad infrastructure itself than the experience you're bolting it on to.
But it's also interesting to think that TikTok made a product that's too good at retaining users' attention, such that they can't be tantalized by an ad to interrupt their addiction.
- hgsgm 4y ago> refining the experience with little consideration of ad revenue, Refining engagement maximization, to maximize ad slots, with a little consideration of user satisfaction.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoI hate to be this guy, but if user was not sufficiently satisfied, the user would not keep using it. I am saying this as a person, who does not like social media.
- halfnormalform 4y agoUnless they're in withdrawal.
- xxpor 4y agoIsn't that essentially the instagram model? They didn't have any ads when FB bought them IIRC, and they didn't add them for quite a while.
- vagabund 4y agoIt's the model of almost every network-effects platform honestly, Facebook's just ruthlessly efficient in the extractive phase
- culturestate 4y ago> They've been hugely successful rolling out successive products/experiences in this manner. Is this actually true, though? Aside from reels on IG, I’m struggling to think of anything that Meta has successfully launched to broad consumer adoption in the last few years.
- vagabund 4y agoStories is the one that comes to mind for me. Another product that was shamelessly replicated from a competitor, but refined under FB, and now represents a meaningful proportion of the platform's ad revenue. And I know you specified launches in the last couple years, but just doing some back of the envelope math, some 60 percent of the world population where Meta isn't banned are MAUs across their family of apps -- hard to argue against their broad consumer adoption generally.
- culturestate 4y agoIf stories (which launched, surprisingly, in 2016) and reels are the only wins we can point to in all of Meta’s platforms for this experience-first-monetization-later approach, can we really say it’s a proven success? Given what’s happened to the Facebook user base in the past ~five years, it feels like Instagram and WhatsApp are still thriving despite Meta’s strategy, not because of it.
- Karellen 4y ago> Zuckerberg framed the low monetization as a conscious part of their product strategy -- that they spend long periods refining the experience with little consideration of ad revenue, and then only afterwards, as a somewhat separate endeavor, begin to investigate ways to monetize efficiently. Also known as stage one of the enshittification process: > first, [platforms] are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- poulsbohemian 4y agoThat sounds a lot like parallel construction for why their products are bleeding users and a pain in the ass for advertisers to actually use.