Facebook is dying. In my social network hardly anybody is using it anymore.
And everybody agrees: Facebook is an ad spoiled crap network with useless content.
I am so surprised that nobody at Facebook recognises this and tries to improve upon.
Make me the CEO and I will fix it :)
Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline
101–110 of 189 posts
Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline
#102The fact is Meta is still raking in $B's in profit a year, so it's not like it needs to do this. Better to focus on long-term retention of users (through fewer ads) than short term profits.
This is the problem with being beholden to public shareholders / stock price, and one reason why Twitter is likely to fare better under Musk (whatever you or I may think of him as a person) than as a public company.
Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah that's more of a startup mentality where you're trying to prove to your next round of investors that your growth is going to be 10x then 100x then 1000x and will then eat an entire industry. If someone's buying Meta stock at this point it's pretty obviously not on an infinite growth trajectory.
I suspect they're still pretending it has growth left; once it's clear that they DO NOT have much growth left, the stock will slowly settle to a "reasonable" p/e. Or suddenly plummet to one, who knows.
> the stock will slowly settle to a "reasonable" p/e
Which law of physics is this the result of?
Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline
#104It 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…
It takes a better alternative for people to change though. Spotify is borderline unusable to me now, it's about 50/50 ads/songs. But I still haven't uninstalled it. I think my usage is now something like, after listening to 5 songs and 5 ads, I get frustrated and switch to a podcast. But, I don't know of any alternative with less ads that works on my phone, so I'm still a user (despite listening for an hour a week in…
I don't use Spotify much (afaict they've done more to damage artist economics than outright piracy), but at least they have a paid/premium layer of service that one can pay for and focus on specific desired content without add interruptions.
Facebook and Instagram? Nope. You can't even pay them for an experience which lets you focus on what you want. Which means that the only economic incentives come from the ad revenue side, and the user engagement side will be seen primarily in terms of manipulation.
Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline
#105i check Instagram maybe a couple of times a year and it's almost exactly like watching your college friends' kids age from afar. Each time you see them, the sensation of how much they've grown is so overwhelming that you can hardly resist saying something along the lines of "I can't believe how big they've gotten!". except with Instagram it's, "this is so much less usable than the last time I tried it. Why does anybo…
Personally, I think the future is in messenger apps. Why login to Instagram or Facebook to see updates when you can have a family/friends group in Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal (pick your poison).
Why login to anything at all? Why use whatsapp, telegram, or signal when every phone already does this and has been doing this for years? I have all of my friends and family in specific groups devoid of any specific apps.
To be fair people were saying the same thing 20 years ago when AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger and Yahoo messenger were the big thing. All messaging platforms will eventually die is my experience thus far.
Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline
#106I actually uninstalled instagram and shot my account yesterday because the ads were getting absolutely atrocious. Decided it was done for me. Looks like I was right.
Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline
#107I advertise pretty heavily on Instagram because, of all the platforms I advertise on, it's the most bang for the buck. I get more conversions from Instagram than anywhere else by almost a factor of 5. This is going to kill engagement. I'd rather pay more for clicks than now be jammed into a crowded feed for hostile eyeballs.
This.
Hopefully they really think about this before doing something so stupid
Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline
#108It 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…
It takes a better alternative for people to change though. Spotify is borderline unusable to me now, it's about 50/50 ads/songs. But I still haven't uninstalled it. I think my usage is now something like, after listening to 5 songs and 5 ads, I get frustrated and switch to a podcast. But, I don't know of any alternative with less ads that works on my phone, so I'm still a user (despite listening for an hour a week in…
Their $9.99/mo sub tier is pretty reasonable, I think. It's 40% less if you're a student.
Course, we have the family plan, and UK prices, so I get ruined. But now I have Netflix I hate ads with a passion, so there we go.
Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline
#109This is great news. The faster Meta can decline and people can reclaim their time the better.
That ship has already sailed, they're not reclaiming time, it's just going somewhere else that's more effective at capturing time.
Re: Instagram to increase ad load as Meta fights revenue decline
#110The real red flag here will be when they remove the ad impression cap and force their advertisers to fork over more money for less quality.
Facebook / IG ad performance dives hard as the number of impressions per ad / per person grows (ie. People scroll by ads they have seen on autopilot).
My guess is they have already accidentally introduced "a bug" which reduces the effectiveness of impression capping but I've got my popcorn ready for the full removal of impression capping.