461–470 of 579 posts
Facebook's revenue up 35% year over year: -26% (P/E ~16) Amazon's revenue up 15% year over year: +12% (P/E 60+) I don't get the stock market. Facebook can simply turn on billions in revenue whenever they want still with WhatsApp, which has north of 2 billion MAU, and has not been monetized at all yet. Facebook is a reverse meme stock.
It's a false narrative that Facebook is pushing out: "It' snot us that are bad, it's this big bad Apple who are hurting our poor business".
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Good riddance? People will keep finding & buying things they need. If nobody’s buying anything from these businesses without invasive advertising & tracking then maybe whatever goods they were selling aren’t actually necessary? Of course there is nuance and edge cases to this, but in general I wouldn’t be surprised if society and the planet was better off once we stop producing useless garbage.
I don't know... I've seen some interesting products thanks to Facebook that I wouldn't have otherwise. Life would be pretty boring if we all only bought what we need.
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I cant upvote you enough. This single comment contains many of the contrarian view against HN. It is nice we have these real world stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against ads, where All Ads are evil.
I have no problem with targeted ads based on what I specifically told Facebook. It’s when I’m shopping on Amazon and see the same products advertised on FB that there is a problem.
Now, I get 90% ads for car parts and car accessories. I don't have a car, I don't drive, I don't have a license, and I don't even like to be in a car, but for whatever reason Amazon (or Instagram?) ads are assuming that what I really want are car parts and car accessories that I don't recognize, can't use, or don't understand.
It feels very stupid to me that those are the "default" ads I'm getting, even though I never tap on them for obvious reasons, but it's reassuring to know that they went from knowing exactly who I am and specifically what I had been looking at to having no clue whatsoever anything about me, or who I am or what I like.
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Then they lacked the imagination. The Facebook app would have become a web browser where Facebook controls user auth, contacts and then payments. Big $$$
>would have become a web browser Not on iOS where that sort of thing is prohibited. Sure they could put a skin over safari, but apple would have banned the entire FB app as soon as they found a developer's app they didn't like.
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Out of curiosity, why can’t you just make the ad point to a custom URL (on which you can then set a cookie if you wanted) and do attribution that way?
That is almost exactly what UTM url parameters are [0]. We use these and via them our other tracking collaborates our theory on Facebooks tracking. There is actually a real problem with tracking via cookies on Facebook ads when the destination is a website. The ad click will open in a Facebook "In App Browser", any cookie that you (or any analytical service) sets will be within that IAB. If the user then uses the "op…
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What about just not using Facebook...
Before this change, Facebook could still track you in non-Facebook apps that use their software. Even if you are not a Facebook user.
I remember when Facebook Platform came out. The super early version where you could embed your app on Facebook and engage with the social graph. I thought dang, this is smart. They’ll basically own the next level up the stack from the browser: they’ll own the “social chrome” of every application on the web. Although it devolved into spam, Facebook was a hot spot of weird social games for a while there. And every web…
So I opened up my editor and wrote a Python client to automate the game; go to forest, attack until your inventory is full, go to town, sell inventory, repeat. I left it run overnight and completely blew past her in progression.
Now everything is an app, and every app uses HTTPS, and every HTTPS connection uses certificate pinning, and I just can't be bothered to do the work anymore to cheat at useless games I don't like.
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Out of curiosity, why can’t you just make the ad point to a custom URL (on which you can then set a cookie if you wanted) and do attribution that way?
That is almost exactly what UTM url parameters are [0]. We use these and via them our other tracking collaborates our theory on Facebooks tracking. There is actually a real problem with tracking via cookies on Facebook ads when the destination is a website. The ad click will open in a Facebook "In App Browser", any cookie that you (or any analytical service) sets will be within that IAB. If the user then uses the "op…
Another way you could potentially get around it is to fingerprint the user and store the basket contents server side and present them to that fingerprint.
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> we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure if the ads we paid for led to sales well. if your goal isn't tracking individuals, then why are you attaching unique ID's (in cookies) to track individuals on your website? And I'm not talking about third-party cookies disguised as first-party. logglytrackingsession (lifetime: session) notion_experiment_device_id (lifetime: 1 year) Both are unique to a sp…
Yes like the peer reply said that's Notion, not us. But good point, another thing to keep in mind if you try to use the "Share to the web" notion feature.
My real point is, if you use a service to provide your own service, you give them your blessing to do whatever they want with your brand. This includes facebook and their tracking scripts.
Thus we need to audit what our service providers are doing and limit their impact once we've completed the evaluation, making sure they don't alter the deal later.
Also tracking ad conversions is as simple as using a unique parameter per campaign, when buying the add. Just append `?campaign=facebook_campaign-name_202202` to your link and that's enough to measure the ads effectiveness. No need to attach unique ID's to users, sessions etc... Aggregates keep the users anonymous and give you enough actionable insight.