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Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

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Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#71

Post by foobarian »

There has got to be a saturation point in apps like this. Kind of like Knuth's Tex codebase, at some point it is finished and you just need bugfixes. So subjecting a product like that to indefinite mandatory revenue increases is bound to ruin it sooner or later.

It makes me wonder, what would it take to run a social network in steady state? It sounds like it would need to be a non-profit or at least private organization. Closest examples that come to mind are Craigslist or Wikipedia.

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#72

Post by justapassenger »

laundermaf wrote: post #32

No joke, on Facebook I'm already seeing one ad for every 2 real posts. On Instagram it's about 1:3 on the home and 1:5 on the reels (but I suppose it depends on how fast you scroll). It's already quite disgusting at this stage. Are they going to flip it to 2 ads every one post? How long before unskippable 30-second ads?

Read the article?

They don’t increase ads in feed, but add them to new places like explore.

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#73

Post by rchaud »

datadata wrote: post #54

It seems so obvious to us that this is a short term win at the expense of the long term. I wonder if data driven companies like this are locked into local minimums via tons of short term optimizations to boost metrics. In optimization algorithms like stochastic gradient descent, some form of entropy (crucially temporarily decreasing fitness) or exploration (having parallel evaluations of the fitness function) is nece…

There is no long term for IG or FB as we know it. MetaVR and MetaAI is what those companies will become.

All IG/FB can do now is squeeze as much ad revenue as possible while there are still hundreds of millions using it daily.

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#74

Post by renewiltord »

rchaud wrote: post #68

The ad-driven business model is why social media apps became monsters eventually. The real change that drove all those billions in ad money was simple: under no circumstances can the user's scroll experience end due to the inventory of scrollable blocks ("content") running out. The user doesn't know right away that the software will scroll infinitely. Email has an end, your IMs have an end. With social media, you hav…

I doubt that. Reddit and HN are mostly ad free and they have the same degree of addictive outrage bait. For instance, every article about Google will be about privacy violations or sunsetting things. Every article about Apple will be about repairing or CSAM.

The people who post these comments will always come back and post them. And the usual war will ensue.

After all you can argue vim v BSD and GPL v Emacs for absolutely free on ad free sites and people always did. Contentiousness rules when contentiousness is supported, as on sites like this.

Or perhaps it's a natural characteristic of social networks.

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#75

Post by evouga »

It's almost impossible to overstate how significantly social media altered the fabric of the Internet. From "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" to everybody having seen multiple photos of your dog. From a decentralized web of special-interest fiefdoms to digital sharecropping.

And now, the era of social media is over. Instagram's death leaves Twitter as the last relevant social network, and Twitter's prospects don't look too rosy these days either.

The fourth era of the Internet appears to be content distribution platforms serving a large audience that passively consumes the content of (or, at best, interacts parasocially with) a small cadre of creators. The digital frontier has been fully settled and it now looks an awful lot like the old country.

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#76

Post by criddell »

ReaLNero wrote: post #69
datadata wrote: post #54

It seems so obvious to us that this is a short term win at the expense of the long term. I wonder if data driven companies like this are locked into local minimums via tons of short term optimizations to boost metrics. In optimization algorithms like stochastic gradient descent, some form of entropy (crucially temporarily decreasing fitness) or exploration (having parallel evaluations of the fitness function) is nece…

> this are locked into local minimum Merely having statistics won't lead you to local optima, it's the incentive structure. Public companies need to have a positive second derivative on their revenue, which trickles down to PMs and directors doing anything in their power to improve the quarterly numbers at long-term costs.

> Public companies need to have a positive second derivative on their revenue

I don't think that's true. In fact I don't think very many public companies have accelerating revenue.

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#77

Post by barbazoo »

fullshark wrote: post #21
nelsonic wrote: post #3

This is great news. The faster Meta can decline and people can reclaim their time the better.

It will just go somewhere else that you consider unworthy. The tools and methods we've developed to attract eyeballs are not going away.

Maybe the next one will be less destructive to our societies

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#78

Post by dec0dedab0de »

standardUser wrote: post #70
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #65

I like instagram, in the same way that I like drinking. I know it's generally bad for me, but I enjoy it. There is a surprising amount of high quality posts about tech, science, history, music, and probably whatever you are interested in. Many of which would be worthy of the hn front page if they were a short blog instead of a short video. It is worthwhile if you can avoid the traps of attractive people dancing, casu…

I refuse to live a life where I avoid attractive people dancing or cute animals.

Oh I agree, but it's way too easy to spend dozens of hours a week looking at them. and next thing you know you're dumber than when you started.

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#79

Post by rchaud »

foobarian wrote: post #71

There has got to be a saturation point in apps like this. Kind of like Knuth's Tex codebase, at some point it is finished and you just need bugfixes. So subjecting a product like that to indefinite mandatory revenue increases is bound to ruin it sooner or later. It makes me wonder, what would it take to run a social network in steady state? It sounds like it would need to be a non-profit or at least private organizat…

Instagram's product is distraction.

It's never finished. People learn and adapt to avoid IG's addiction mechanisms. IG then has to zag its approach to get "viewing time" numbers back up.

Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline

#80

Post by barbazoo »

jcfrei wrote: post #39

The rise and fall of all social networks is inevitable. Like many things they follow this dynamic where they go out of fashion when too many use it. Currently everybody is moving to TikTok and there's lots of good content there. But that platform too will fade eventually and another one appear.

Is there some precedent of this from the past? I haven't heard of this "rule".
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