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Meta Myths

stratechery.com

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Re: Meta Myths

#51

Post by Spivak »

giantrobot wrote: post #48
mjr00 wrote: post #33

Interesting article. People really want Meta to fail because the "metaverse" is one of the dumbest pivots of an established company of all time. Since the pivot and rename happened a year ago, the metaverse has probably bombed -- and I say probably only because nobody can define exactly what it is, still , beyond people having VR meetings with odd pseudo-Mii avatars -- and the investors convinced that Zuckerberg was…

I don't think it's a question of can Meta walk things back but whether Zuckerberg has the humility to do so. It certainly doesn't seem like Zuckerberg possesses that ability so it's more likely they'll just double down on "the metaverse".

I don’t think they actually have to walk anything back. Facebook seems like it’s going to still be successful even if the metaverse loses money forever.

Re: Meta Myths

#52

Post by drh »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #45
alexpotato wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of how FB advertising worked as the following: 1. You purchase ads on FB 2. You tell FB how much a conversion is worth to you (let's call that $W) 3. You link your site to FB (via a pixel etc) so that they can automatically measure conversions. They say this is for you so that you can see which ads are actually working. 4. In reality, FB now knows what a conversion is worth to you so they can keep up…

Honestly, I'm not sure how to say this politely, but your argument does not map to my understanding of how FB ads worked (I was there from 2013-18, predominantly working on ads). Steps 1-3 are correct, step 4 is not. What actually happened is that you'd say I want to spend $10 on FB ads. There's a system called pacing that reduces your bid most of the time so that you don't run out of budget before the end of the day…

Fascinating. Hadn’t thought about the pacing factor.

So given this is the case, how does any advertiser scale up their spending without getting disillusioned and abandoning FB ads?

Re: Meta Myths

#53

Post by nemothekid »

mjr00 wrote: post #33

Interesting article. People really want Meta to fail because the "metaverse" is one of the dumbest pivots of an established company of all time. Since the pivot and rename happened a year ago, the metaverse has probably bombed -- and I say probably only because nobody can define exactly what it is, still , beyond people having VR meetings with odd pseudo-Mii avatars -- and the investors convinced that Zuckerberg was…

>People really want Meta to fail because the "metaverse" is one of the dumbest pivots of an established company of all time

I believe people want Meta to fail because the spent the better part of last 5 years completely eviscerating their reputation and goodwill. While Facebook, at its prepandemic peak was hemorrhaging young users and becoming known as the platform for misinformation and arguments due to the chase for engagements at all costs, Zuckerberg was bust cosplaying as presidential candidate. People want Facebook to fail and I think that's a consequence of how terrible their reputation has become.

Re: Meta Myths

#54

Post by [deleted] »

AlbertCory wrote: post #7

A good article. > This level of investment simply isn’t viable for a company like Snap or Twitter or any of the other also-rans in digital advertising (even beyond the fact that Snap relies on cloud providers instead of its own data centers) Let's change the industry to autos: "Funbag Autos has a massive investment in aluminum companies. This level of investment simply isn’t viable for a company like Tesla ... (even…

[deleted]

Re: Meta Myths

#55

Post by eachro »

saltythrowaway wrote: post #26

Throwaway for obvious reasons. I joined to work on meta ads semi-recently. My thinking was that they were under invested in techniques I knew were successful from my time at Google. What I found was a lot of smart people who knew they were under invested and we're capable of closing the gap, but the infrastructure they sat upon was too hard to use to do anything different, and management that rewarded the appearance…

if you're allowed to say, what sort of techniques from google are they underinvested in?

Re: Meta Myths

#56

Post by Spivak »

atirip wrote: post #34

> Reels usage is still growing But of course, as Meta put gun to the head of everyone - you WILL make Reels, or else - and now all the people I follow, increasingly make Reels. I hate Reels.

Yeah but they’re not really for you. They’re for making it easy for Tiktok creators to cross-post their content.

IG, FB, and YT all realized that if they force creators to choose between making Tiktoks and posts/videos they’re going to make Tiktoks. The cost of making entirely separate content has to be worth the extra audience and you can change the calculus by making the cost really low.

Re: Meta Myths

#57

Post by miketery »

mjr00 wrote: post #33

Interesting article. People really want Meta to fail because the "metaverse" is one of the dumbest pivots of an established company of all time. Since the pivot and rename happened a year ago, the metaverse has probably bombed -- and I say probably only because nobody can define exactly what it is, still , beyond people having VR meetings with odd pseudo-Mii avatars -- and the investors convinced that Zuckerberg was…

The metaverse is not bombing. It’s simply not tied to one platform.

Between TikTok, Roblox, Minecraft, call of duty (and other triple A multiplayer games), we’re already there.

Meta can’t win this one. Same way that no single game publisher can dominate video games.

Even the hardware, fine meta becomes the first “Nintendo”. So what? The PlayStations and Xbox’s will come. No one will let Meta have a monopoly.

Re: Meta Myths

#58

Post by rmvt »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #36

I am pretty sure that Kodak or Nokia had pretty healthy results when the wind turned for them. Those kinds of ships are so big that it is very easy for managers, investors and employees to convince themselves that everything is _fine_. The biggest problem, for Meta, in my opinion, is not the brand, not the business model and not the competition. The problem is much worse because it is internal and probably too late t…

> Their engineering culture as a whole is a one trick pony.

what do you mean by this? what's their one trick?

Re: Meta Myths

#59

Post by justapassenger »

paulpauper wrote: post #46

Meta made so many mistakes, the metaverse being one. Facebook's layout sucks, imho. The old one was better. There is a long history of VR being a commercial failure. This is something that could have been avoided. With PE ratio of just 9, it' very cheap though.

There was also a long history of PDAs being commercial failures.

I'm not saying that Facebook will succeed there. But in the past VR was a failure because tech was just not ready. Is it ready now? Maybe. Will it fail? Maybe. But past failures will have nothing to do with future ones.

Re: Meta Myths

#60

Post by miketery »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #36

I am pretty sure that Kodak or Nokia had pretty healthy results when the wind turned for them. Those kinds of ships are so big that it is very easy for managers, investors and employees to convince themselves that everything is _fine_. The biggest problem, for Meta, in my opinion, is not the brand, not the business model and not the competition. The problem is much worse because it is internal and probably too late t…

Can you expand more on the one truck pony? My understanding is that they have some of the best build tools, AB testing infra, and global scalability.
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