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Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

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Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#181

Post by untilHellbanned »

jdhn wrote: post #149
teirce wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just a crazy millennial, but I absolutely loathe the idea of FB / Insta stories. Snapchat going under wouldn't convince me to move over -- I'd just stop using the service and move on to communicating some other way. And Stories aren't the only appeal of SNAP, though I suppose they are a large producer of revenue. HN just loves to hate SNAP, and I can't really fathom why. I can get being skeptical but every…

Another crazy millennial here. I don't have an Instagram either, and frankly I don't want one. As for why HN hates Snap, I'm not exactly sure. Is it because the average user on HN is older and isn't targeted by Snap? Maybe it's seen as a frivolous plaything? No matter what the reason, there's definitely a lot of hate for Snap on this site.

It's because people at SNAP made a lot of money and {HN_user} did not.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#182

Post by Sir_Substance »

likpok wrote: post #94
Sir_Substance wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly. Of course you can, you just need to have standardized protocols. You and I can use any email provider we like, your client can use exchange to talk to it's server and mine can use a version of POP from the 80's and it /doesn't matter/ because the servers talk over a stand…

There's a real engineering cost to federation. Your email example is a good one, I think. But digging a little deeper, what's the last major feature that got added to email? For example, we've been trying to get encryption in email for longer than WhatsApp has ever existed. WhatsApp rolled out encryption for everyone on its network last year. That's a billion people! I'd be surprised if 100 thousand people regularly…

The idea that centralization leads to better UX results is demonstrably false. Popcorn Time is a great example of distributed streaming providing a considerably better UX than most commercial solutions.

Additionally, the notion that the necessity of making group decisions on a protocol must lead to stagnation is not guaranteed. There's plenty of space for Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter to form an an industry working group and make a protocol that meets their needs, and then throw it out and say "this is what we're using. Keep up or get left behind".

However, to more directly answer your concerns, there's nothing stopping Facebook from exposing basic functionality via an established and fairly firm protocol, and keeping advanced features as their competitive advantage. Textual Timeline posts, IM's and event RSVP's are good candidates for things to be exposed by the protocol. Facial tagging of images is a good example of something that a core social protocol could skip.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#183

Post by zeep »

grandalf wrote: post #88

Interestingly, I'm someone who does not click on ads, but the last 3 ads I've clicked on were on Facebook, and two resulted in purchases. I can't help it when the ads are for cool things like a $20 USB endoscope.

looks like it is $14 on amazon with free shipping

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#184

Post by ptr_void »

brandnewlow wrote: post #180
ptr_void wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me sad. I wish it was the case that the top companies have produced the most productivity/useful goods, not a messaging site with advertise that people use at their off times.

Facebook lets over a million companies get their products in front of people who are inclined to purchase them. When those Facebook users do in fact click and make purchases it is often (not always) a profitable exchange for the companies advertising. Those companies take the revenue from the sales and use it to pay people to do other work for them. Wherever it is you work, they probably advertise on Facebook. Creati…

If not with Facebook and Alphabet, there would still be most of those companies selling their products, with other means or site. There's not much that Facebook adds other than number of people it has using their site during their off times. If people needed to buy things, they could have easily looked it up on other sites or real places. There are many companies that do much more important things, produces more useful goods/productivity/services.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#186

Post by dbbk »

StevePerkins wrote: post #77

Maybe I live in a bubble, but I just assumed that Facebook would be on a decline trajectory by now. Their website is almost meaningless to my day-to-day life at this point. I login once every couple of weeks, upload some pics of my kids for Grandma to look at, and then log off. I don't personally know anyone who still uses it regularly as we did back in 2007. I don't know a tactful way to put this... but it seems lik…

To be fair, your behaviour does count you in the MAU.

I'm from the UK and just left university. Everything social at university is organised on Facebook still, through Groups and Events. Weirdly, I can't even think of any competing service that societies and sports clubs would move to.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#187

Post by dbbk »

adventured wrote: post #155
jumpkickhit wrote: post #115

I'll give them credit, Facebook figured out how to monetize themselves. Versus say, Twitter, which i don't use and still don't understand how it even exists.

Interestingly, Twitter's problem is not monetization, it's cost vs scale. They managed to do $2.5 billion in sales with about 300 million monthly actives for 2016 (the 300m is wonky, I don't know what the avg was for the year etc, but they were near that anyway). If you scaled them to Facebook's size, they'd be at an equivalent $16.5 billion annually. Account for the benefits of scale that Facebook derives, and it's…

Twitter's spending is just bonkers out of control. And from my understanding, they haven't even tried to curb it. Twitter could be a happily profitable company if they just shed some of the fat.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#188

Post by altern8tif »

bllguo wrote: post #69
virtuexru wrote: post #4

> Facebook’s formidable ad business, along with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, soaked up 99% of the online ad industry’s growth last year, according to Pivotal Research. Does that seem crazy to anyone else?

It's crazy to me in the sense that Snap is apparently <1% of growth in digital advertising.

Why would that be crazy? Snap is new to the game and their active user base is an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook or Google.

If Snap starts showing signs of accelerating DAU/MAU growth, then there's a chance that they'll be >1% of the market.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#190

Post by debaserab2 »

ghthor wrote: post #174
teirce wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just a crazy millennial, but I absolutely loathe the idea of FB / Insta stories. Snapchat going under wouldn't convince me to move over -- I'd just stop using the service and move on to communicating some other way. And Stories aren't the only appeal of SNAP, though I suppose they are a large producer of revenue. HN just loves to hate SNAP, and I can't really fathom why. I can get being skeptical but every…

Yeah, I don't get it either. As far as I'm concerned Snap is one of the most interesting startups recently because they started with as a software company that managed to actually make a Good consumer hardware item that I wear everyday. I love my Spectacles, I wasn't even a snapchat user before they released, but they are a slick device.

Do you ever feel a little creepy wearing those?

I've seen a few people with them on, and my immediate gut reaction every time is to get out of their eyesight. I'm sure I'm not the only one and it makes me wonder if most spectacles owners even think about it.

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