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Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

economist.com

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

#491

Post by morelisp »

samwillis wrote: post #94
prasadjoglekar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly, as a small business we are completely dependent on the ad platforms internal attribution tools, if they don't work or can't be trusted we won't use them. It's unfortunate that the incredably invasive tracking and profile building has become conflated with ad attribution. For us attribution is essential and we have little interest or use for invasive tracking. We just want to know from which ad a customer con…

I work in adtech and hear "We don't want to track people, we just want to know what events led to conversion" all the damn time. (Or conversely, from the sell side, "we don't want to track people, we just want to learn/verify our audience's composition.).

Sorry to break it to you, but that's what tracking is.

You're saying you don't want remarking, but - you want to know something that requires marking. "Remarking" is just persistent marking. What you don't want is "retargeting", which is when the user gets to learn someone is building a profile of them. But that's just whether the "marked" profile is used to also "target" - the profile gets built either way.

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

#492

Post by mercutio2 »

user_7832 wrote: post #238
ksec wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disagree. The problem was never about the ads. It was about the fact that ads were forced, privacy-invasive (due to customization) and generally were terrible overall (think malware/crypto mining risks, terrible UX - think annoyingly flashy gifs, or those gigantic banners in the middle of a scenic drive), not to mention poorly regulated, leading to lots of "double your money/phallus in 3 days!" type of scams. There…

Oh, anti advertising maximalists certainly exist! I'm certainly not in the majority, but if I could live in a world where:

A) Advertising was considered so extremely gauche that no one did it B) No revenue from advertising existed C) Ad-supported services went away

I would be a very happy man.

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

#493

Post by nottorp »

hollowdene wrote: post #39

There's a whole ecosystem of businesses that rely on Facebook that are going to start hurting a lot over the next few years. I used to work at a publisher where 80% of their website traffic came from Facebook. They haven't seen audience growth in years and their audience is skewing older and older, which is bad for their advertising business Businesses like that are going to get steadily squeezed both by Facebook's d…

> their audience is skewing older and older

Been reading that facebook is out of fashion for the young uns for several years, way before any privacy changes on part of anyone.

Also, question: how do they know their audience's average age? From invasive tracking?

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

#494

Post by maybelsyrup »

thorncorona wrote: post #398
maybelsyrup wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads are evil. To work, they play upon human insecurity. In many cases, they create desires or perceived needs that weren't there before, making them wasteful in addition to scammy/conniving. Because they're successfully evil - the tricks work - they often leave a residue on people: beyond just never being able to forget a jingle from a cereal ad you heard when you were 8, a lifetime of very frequent exposure to adver…

I‘m sorry “they often leave a residue on people”? At least half of your polemic needs citations.

Oh dang sorry, I'll get right on that

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

#495

Post by zarriak »

krapp wrote: post #302
zarriak wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuck moved first in “metaverse” with Oculus 7 years ago and what does he have to show for it? Some decent/good hardware locked behind logging into your Facebook account. If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.

>If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure. Did they fail? Most people don't hate Facebook as much as HN and seem not to have a problem with Oculus requiring a Facebook account, given that the Quest 2 is the best selling VR headset by far.

In my account they definitely failed. As you say, they did a great job with the hardware but the only real software they are even advertising for it is a worse version of vrchat that they took way too long to clone. I don’t know how to chock it up other than as a failure, they acquired instagram only 2 years earlier. Instagram is now a Snapchat tiktok and a little YouTube wrapped into one.

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

#496

Post by oconnore »

CrazyStat wrote: post #486
oconnore wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does ability to attribute an ad depend on the ability to track individuals? IIUC, you can do attribution with a very basic ad: Come buy my product, you'll love it! Then you sum up all the "/ad-34" hits, and figure out how many of those user sessions (which are now on your own site -- single domain, but perhaps leveraging a script supplied by the ad network) went and actually bought something. The ad network can c…

You do not understand correctly. Facebook (and other ad networks) want credit if someone clicks on your ad, spends time on your site, but then doesn't actually buy anything until a couple days when they enter the URL directly (i.e. not clicking on an ad). This is the problem generally referred to as attribution. Facebook (and others) do this by tracking everyone all around the web. They track the ad click and then th…

You can do that with first-party cookies though.

Allow some facebook supplied javascript to set a first party cookie when the user hits website.com/ad-34, and then reference that 1st party cookie the next day when the user returns. Phone home when they buy something. Facebook can now correlate (1) the ping they received to begin with, (2) the user session cookie they initiated on the first visit, and (3) the user session they observed when a purchase was made.

I'm sure things get easier with 3rd party tracking, but fundamentally you can do it without cross-site tracking.

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

#497

Post by scarface74 »

cheriot wrote: post #474
scarface74 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By 2009, mobile was clearly the future. But the phones were underpowered and didn’t run web pages well. Even today, most of the world is browsing the internet on low end phones where the web provides a sub par experience. Desktop penetration is lower outside of the US. Aren’t Internet cafes still a thing in much of the world because people don’t have computers at home?

I think internet cafe's are pretty old school everywhere now. Anecdotally, much of the developing world leapfrogged the US on mobile/fintech. People had low end smart phones and banked with their phone carriers 5+ years ago in East Africa. Latest anecdote (this week) is not seeing internet cafe's in Belize and government PSA's say to contact them on whatsapp. That said, Facebook makes their money in rich countries.

I’m an ignorant American, you mean what I see on 90 Day Fiancé is not representative of the rest of the world?

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

#498

Post by Foobar8568 »

bko wrote: post #149
criddell wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this isn't a lie and Apple flipping that switch cost Facebook $10bn, then that tells me my personal information is worth a lot. What I was getting from Facebook in exchange for my data was too little. I use Google a lot more than Facebook and frankly what I get from them in exchange for my data is probably also way too little. I wish there was some type of consumer union where we could negotiate with these compani…

It's not perfect but you can look at average revenue per user on Facebook. There are huge differences based on the country (note this is quarterly): Q4 '20 Worldwide: 10.14 US: 53.56 Europe: 16.87 Asia Pacific: 4.05 Rest of world: 2.77 So you're worth just over $200 a year. This has gone up a lot over time and is considerably higher than other social networks. Just a year ago, it was 41.41 (23% less) and a year befor…

The earning slides from SNAP compare the DAU and ARPU of SNAP, Twitter and FB, reg. the ARPU, they are respectively $29, $72 and $274.

https://s25.q4cdn.com/442043304/files/doc_presentations/2022...

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

#499

Post by Thorentis »

deckard1 wrote: post #436
bryan_w wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I always wondered: why is Apple allowing WeChat to exist? Their mini apps seem in direct competition with the app store. Is this a China political thing? Are they worried about losing all access to the market there? It seems clear Apple is not applying their own rules consistently. If that's the case, wouldn't there also be anti-trust implications here?

> Is this a China political thing?

Yes.

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

#500

Post by Brendinooo »

ineedasername wrote: post #322
scarface74 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people really use desktops that much in 2021 for personal use? Facebook is already seen as being “for old people”.

78% of homes have a computer in them. [0] I don't know anyone who does not use a PC for personal use, and my non-work social circles are not at all techie dominated. Also I'm not talking about 2021: I'm talking about years ago when Facebook moved away from prioritizing the PC platform. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered, I don't know, but when FB became a primary entry point to the internet for many people, and FB then…

Anecdata, but I'm teaching a coding class for 10-12 year olds and most of them don't know their way around a laptop. Most of their work has been done on tablets or maybe phones.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that huge chunks of demographics don't really use desktops or laptops all that much.

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