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Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

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451–460 of 579 posts

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought you could not short stocks in an Ira, only sell covered calls? Is there some way around this rule? https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/10311...

You can do Level 2 options trading in a IRA. So you can sell covered puts / calls, or buy puts /calls. Those do not require margin. You cannot sell uncovered calls / puts, which would require margin. Part of my position was buying $280 weekly puts which were $1.39 each, now $49.5 each ( still haven't sold lol).

thx!

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#452

The problem isn't just Apple's action on IDFA. It's that Facebook seems to be so poorly managed on some fronts that its reactions, rather than mitigating problems, has caused further harm. For example - in a rushed effort to get their privacy issues in order, they are deactivating the live facebook integrations of customers based on cursory/mistaken/possibly machine-based readings of their privacy policies. They did…

"we don't want to track individuals" --- right, but each ad FB places has a lower conversion rate if they don't know as much about the user, so while your goal may not be tracking per se, tracking does get you the same sales in fewer placements, and Facebook can sell those saved placements to other buyers the fact that they're cracking down on partner privacy in a hamfisted way surely doesn't help matters but I can't…

I agree with your first point in the sense that having individualised targeting data necessarily improves advertising by some amount vs. merely contextual and aggregate data. For our specific case I'm not convinced that amount is as big as some people imagine it is, but I haven't found a good way to test that precisely given that facebook doesn't really have a "just give me a representative sample of your audience in this region" targeting feature (wish it did) to compare with the targeted alternatives. In our case, app ads that now use SKAN (the Apple solution that provides aggregated attribution) seem to be working well enough - that was my point.

Regarding your second point, yes, I agree - it's not obvious. Assuming this did indeed affect many developers like us and that it happened to everyone at the same time (which may not be the case - that it happened to us and that it coincided with their earnings report may have just been a coincidence - I haven't seen a mass outcry on twitter or anything), I was wondering whether it might be hedge funds that buy/track aggregated ad spend or attribution data, perhaps from MMPs or media buying agencies. I know they buy app download data from the likes of App Annie, but don't know if equivalent data is available and timely for ad spend. In any case, my point is more that this is illustrative of how they make bad situations worse for themselves.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#453

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> All ads are useless I don't think I've ever seen someone say this. People hate that they make the internet impossible to use. I have a family friend that runs a small business and all of the revenue comes from ads on the websites they run. I hate using their website because of the ads. Pop-up that takes up the whole screen asking to subscribe, auto-play video ad, content moving as ads get loaded slowly. It's all ju…

Ublock origin and pihole make the internet a more pleasant experience for me. It has been suggested that I should feel some nagging voice causing guilt that I do not support the sites and apps I use that depend on ad revenue. Perhaps there should be, but there is not. Apple's position on this is just responding to demand. When wifi access points start offering built in enabled pihole by default those access points wi…

Self-hosted ads COULD be a dramatic improvement, if the companies start vetting these ads in some way

My guess is it'll result in backend web modules that make it easy to automatically dynamically re-host the same virus- and tracker-infested malware ads we all hate

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't care. My privacy shouldn't be forced to be sacrificed just because you decided to make a cheese grater that's better than every other cheese grater in existence. >If you feel cheese graters are useless and somehow deserve to remain unbought, then replace it with any other item which does match your bar for utility value. I am doing this for nearly everything I can think of, and my privacy wins every sin…

This is off topic, I was responding to OP's statement that online ads are always useless You may well find that any societal usefulness is offset by your own principles, whether that's privacy or aversion to tech or aversion to capitalism or aversion to marketing or aversion to small businesses or what have you. Can't argue with principles, and I won't try. The topic though is whether there is any societal usefulness…

Societal usefulness is not defined in a vacuum - it’s fundamentally based on the principles of everyone in the society. And judging by the people who chose not to share data with Facebook, society is better off without the targeted ads.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is off topic, I was responding to OP's statement that online ads are always useless You may well find that any societal usefulness is offset by your own principles, whether that's privacy or aversion to tech or aversion to capitalism or aversion to marketing or aversion to small businesses or what have you. Can't argue with principles, and I won't try. The topic though is whether there is any societal usefulness…

In a thread that is broadly about giving users the choice in how their personal data is tracked, analyzed, and utilized for the sake of ads, how is my comment off-topic? I mean, OP posited that perhaps we're better off without companies whose goods rely on targeted/invasive advertising, you provided the perspective of someone who might really rely on that sort of advertising, and I suggested that my right to privacy…

Fair enough, it was relevant to the topic of the thread, albeit not my comment. Apologies

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#456
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well no one's arguing that targeted ads are not effective. Oh they sure were. All ads are useless. Targeted ads are evil. And Ads should not be targeted were the HN's view, which later became there shouldn't even be any ads, it should all be subscription. That is 2018/19. By 20/21 HN were even targeting those who were working inside the online Ad industry. And this is seen across the tens of thousands of comments. (…

> All ads are useless I don't think I've ever seen someone say this. People hate that they make the internet impossible to use. I have a family friend that runs a small business and all of the revenue comes from ads on the websites they run. I hate using their website because of the ads. Pop-up that takes up the whole screen asking to subscribe, auto-play video ad, content moving as ads get loaded slowly. It's all ju…

Freakonomics had an episode with some econ professors who claimed their research with eBay showed targeted ads are not worth the cost. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#457

As a rough datapoint, I run a consumer targeted e-commerce site. We ran a campaign before Christmas were we were selling a new product that was only marketed on Facebook, we are certain that (almost) all customers found it though that Facebook campaign. Facebook was only able to attribute about 50% of the sales to the ads, it should have been close to 100%. This then meant that Facebooks estimated CPA was effectively…

Agreed. For advertisers with larger budgets, marketing mix models are still the only way to understand the relative performance of FB, Google, TV etc. - each of which is a "walled garden" that doesn't exchange data with others. FB marketing is effective, question is at what price. If those prices drop, ad dollars will flow back. It will take a few quarterly modeling cycles to reflect this though. The contra-contraria…

FB attracts big ad dollars as they will continue to claim to have huge audience reach

>if a user does not have their Facebook and Instagram accounts linked in the company's Account Center, those accounts will be considered as two separate people for ad planning and measurement.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211031105427/https://adage.com...

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the shop? I partly live in the UK, don't run iOS, don't use Facebook and block ads about a billion different ways at once. There's a chance I might be interested in your products.

If you used Facebook and didn’t block ads about a billion different ways, you might already know what their product is!

But then again. If it was an interesting product, Facebook would be the last place on earth where it’s advertised. Don’t know what it is but I’m predicting it sucks.
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