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 double what it actually was.
Important to note about 60% of our customers are on an iOS device, which is a little higher than the global average but matches the market segment we are in in the UK.
The situation improved after about 4 weeks, I believe Facebook now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS, but it's somewhat difficult to be sure as by then we had other campaigns running.
So, this will definitely be effecting marketers decision making process of where to allocate spend. It certainly made us more courteous about spending on Facebook.
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-contrarian view is this: FB, Google have an unusual mix of large, medium and small advertisers all bidding for the same inventory. That's what makes FB and Google somewhat immune to large advertiser pricing pressures (and issue of the day spend bans). However, only the larger advertisers have budgets for complicated cross-publisher modeling. If organic FB tools show higher CPAs, it will drive the smaller marketers to other platforms causing some interesting feedback loops.
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 converted.
Personally we avoid the more invasive remarking tools as I hate it myself when you are chased across the web by a product you have looked at once.
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.
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.
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 are a few "fair" advertising companies (the name slips me) that I am perfectly happy with. A static, discreet ad need not be bad. Several ads are absolute works of art and passion. The vast majority are not.
What we have is (techy) folks wanting to not have a shitty experience, and the average privacy-conscious user not wanting tracking. Companies do not respect (or care enough) for these which is why you have an anti-ad point of view.
(I should probably write about this.)
Ads synthesize desire and cause people to be unhappy when the ads work. They encourage expending money that could have been saved, or taking on debt. They also create a funding situation where media producers are beholden to corporations.
The implementation of ads is also wildly invasive, creepy, and propagandistic. However, focusing on implementation allows ad salesmen to lessen the sharpness of the criticism by supposing there is some "nice" way this could be done.
First, it's not "all ads are evil". It's the spying and tracking of ads that most people oppose.
Second, how is this a "balanced ideological fight" counterargumnet. Let's say I oppose Facebook ads as invasion of privacy (and I do). A person on the internet used Facebook ads to make money. Those are contrary why? It's not like I'm sitting here and was like "oh, now that someone made money on the ads, I'm totally in favor of them."
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 advertising trains us to suspend our criticality, or hinders us from developing it in the first place. So it leaves people dumber, too, more pliable and dependent. Hilarious in a country like the US, whose national mythos is so obsessive about personal liberty and rugged self-reliance.
We have a family friend, retired now, who had a successful career in marketing and strategy in multi-billion dollar transnational companies. I once asked (probably naively) why [maker of extremely popular product at the time] ran so little advertising. The friend told me "they have a good product. They don't need to spend money haranguing people into buying it or spreading the word about because it's actually good. Word of mouth is free".
While there are plenty of people annoyed by any ads at all or who believe any form of marketing is inherently evil, that is not at all a majority view. Yet almost everyone hates the way Facebook does it except sellers. The problem isn't the ads. It's the level of surveillance required to make them as effectively targeted as they are. People don't want everything they ever do to be recorded, catalogued, and studied to build a psychological profile of their global purchasing habits.
Well no one's arguing that targeted ads are not effective. This is just an example of how well it works, so upvoting it may not be the best way to bolster your side of the fight.
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.
The real world story is that marketing in one channel is a little worse now... I don't feel like that justifies the existence of data-mining to show ads.
> Did you use a Facebook-specific link in the ads?
I do sometimes find it odd that such a thing is insufficient for tracking sources of traffic in and of itself. No doubt there is a complexity that I have missed
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 "open in Safari/Chrome" option that tracking can be broken as there is no cookie. Ideally you want your visitor to either complete their transaction within the IAB or to use the "open in Safari" option immediately so that any tracking parameters are copied to the other browser allowing the cookie to be set.
In our case the majority of our customers will have a better experience outside of the IAB and so we have a popup that prompts them to use "open in Safari" before navigating away from the first page view. We actually implemented this after noticing a very high drop out rate for iOS Facebook IAB users during our checkout. What was happening is address/payment card autocomplete isn't available within the Facebook IAB and people were clicking "open in Safari" during the checkout in order to use it, they would then find themselves with an empty shopping cart, hence the drop out.
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.
> I believe Facebook now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS
Is that even legal? With AI, you can never concretely prove anything, so you then have Facebook literally making up numbers it pinky swears are legit and billing you accordingly (semi-directly because while you're not paying per click, the landing page analytics are also used to weed out robo clicks and other fraud that you shouldn't be billed for).
I am not sure it's ethical, but I don't think any laws would be broken - if their customers don't like paying for imaginary services, well, they can go elsewhere... or can they?
If you're so certain, it means you already have reliable data for attribution. Why do you need Facebook's tracking to confirm it to you?
I understand it's nice to have fancy reports etc but it sounds like you already know where your customers are coming from. And tracking is very invasive, in this case it doesn't really seem to add much value.
You could also ask your customers "where did you hear about us" for example. Perhaps you already do and that's the source of that 100%. If not you might even discover a way you didn't know of. Eg word of mouth, some obscure forum where your product was mentioned. As well as that it's a method where you respect your users' privacy.
> If you're so certain, it means you already have reliable data for attribution. Why do you need Facebook's tracking to confirm it to you?
We were in unique situation with this one campaign where, quite right, we knew where our conversions were coming from as we were confident there was no other source. Within a few weeks we had other campaigns running and no longer could have the same level of confidence.
The point it outside of this unique situate of a new product only marketed on Facebook the conversion attribution on their platform is broken. This is affecting marketers decision making process and reducing the spend on that platform.
The interesting thing is we were able to see the affect of Apples change quite clearly. Most people are not able to see that.
You attribute 0% of purchases to repeat loyal customers who just check in on what you're selling every now and again without needing to be reminded by a marketing campaign?
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 dev was learning how to build Facebook apps. We wondered if we’d even really need a domain for much more than a landing page, if 99% of our engagement was going to come through Facebooks.
And then they killed it because they wanted to own the entire experience inside Facebook. It became not a walled garden, but a walled flower pot.
It always seemed short sighted to me. Yes, they lost control allowing third party apps in their frame. But didn’t they want to be a Microsoft and not a WordPerfect?
Looking back, I wonder if it was a missed opportunity. They have to go try to be the metaverse because social never became a platform.
I kind of miss those awful games, honestly. There was one my girlfriend at the time was playing, and I thought it was interesting but kind of tedious, the UI reacted too slow, etc.
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.
I'm still playing one, actually: https://www.mousehuntgame.com. They transitioned to just being a web game that runs in a FB frame for users that still wanted to play it there, but I haven't had an FB account for years now, and I can still play right at the URL.
"Interesting but kind of tedious" is absolutely a great descriptor, though. It's basically an incremental game that grows at the slowest possible rate you can imagine.
"Social Chrome" is a base of moving sand, just like Google AMP, it works for a brief while via platform's power but will phase out; web game died out naturally with devices becomes cheaper, and consumers going mobile (and consoles).
Then they lacked the imagination. The Facebook app would have become a web browser where Facebook controls user auth, contacts and then payments. Big $$$
Maybe their desktop traffic wouldn't have tanked so much if they'd kept it a richer experience, and continue to enrich it. Instead they abandoned it completely once traffic patterns tipped towards mobile.
Nice how Zuck said $10bn in the analysts call with nothing to back it up, but the whole press jumps on it. Apple is not Facebook's problem, all they did was giving users a choice, which should have happened ages ago. So Facebook just says Apple kills our business without ever thinking that maybe users don't like the way they do business. If they did, they wouldn't opt out…
Yeah, the CEO of a company saying numbers on official communication to investors is pretty compelling evidence on its own, especially if it's bad news. Executives don't generally lie about specifics to their investors, unless they're doing something completely fraudulent. And if you think that's the case for Facebook, you're going to need more evidence then just a gut feeling.
True, but if the internal attitude of Facebook is to be as pessimistic as possible about the IDFA changes and make them the scapegoat for all problems (which they've advertised via their public stance on the issue), that would show up in the projections even if nobody is "lying".
What would be his motive for saying revenue would be $10B less than previous trends would predict? They posted record revenue again in 2021, so it doesn't look like he's trying to cast a scapegoat for stagnant revenue.
According to what I read (not first hand, of course), he said that 10bn because of Apple's decision. That's a different thing than just saying 10bn, and to pressure Apple to let loose on privacy seems motivation enough to me.
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.
We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on facebook app ads per month. We can deal with IDFA giving way to more aggregated attribution (we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure if the ads we paid for led to sales). But facebook breaking our app in production because they can't be bothered doing their job properly is very serious. It can't be solved by reducing ad spend, only by removing their SDK from our app.
If this is also happening to many other developers right now, that, more than the Q4 results or the IDFA issue itself, could be causing the drop in the share price.
In fact, if you look at the Q4 results, the earnings miss was more because of growth in G&A (which grew by 3 percentage-points of revenue if I'm not mistaken) than because of a top-line slowdown. And if you read the comments as to what made G&A grow, it's 'legal costs'.
> 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 specific user and are used to identify a single individual. The first one is short-lived, but obviously meant for tracking and the second one can be used for tracking, identifies a single individual and is long-lived.
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.
"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 see how angry devs are driving the share price down
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.
I see this in the thread but I have to say that I disagree a bit. I'm certainly glad Apple gave users a choice, but you have to consider "the tyranny of the default" which is a great phrase I think. Most people will simply use the default option, so Apple's choice of default says something.
The default is to ask you with buttons that are the same size. You can specifically go into settings and disable tracking for all apps. But it isn’t the default.
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 declining audience share and Facebook's own efforts to change what people see.
Really what you're saying is that there's a whole ecosystem of businesses that depend on unavoidable surveillance.
All Apple have done is allow users to say no.
They haven't even stopped anyone opting into surveillance if they want to. It just turns out that, when given the choice, people don't like being snooped on.
this seems to be the main new data point that is now evident for all to see
I mean it is sort of obvious to anybody not captured and with basic morals but such is the allure of greed that for ages people were cynically and hypocritically pretending otherwise
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 think you've ever started a company with a new product. What if you make the world's best cheese grater. Nobody knows about it. You don't have connections to supermarkets. Smaller stores don't want to carry your niche item. You have $5000 budget to get your cheese grater out. How do you let people know about it?
Online targetted advertising is basically the current established way to find those people who actually would care about your special cheese grater and start to get your business going. If you're looking at alternatives those would be either untargetted online advertising (incredibly inefficient, only people who don't care about cheese graters would see your ads and that's your $5000 down the toilet) or real world advertising like... Door to door salesmen? Or take out fliers in your local newspaper? That's what people used to do
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.
> There's a whole ecosystem of businesses that rely on Facebook that are going to start hurting a lot over the next few years.
Starting? Did these publishers not learn anything from the whole Facebook Video debacle? [1] Also, who at these companies thinks tying their core business to a single, third party is a good idea?
Video on Facebook is still very big, though. A lot of publishers have taken to recycling TikTok videos and turning them into compilations for Facebook and Instagram. It's all low quality stuff, but it works. It's hugely ironic that some of the most popular content on Facebook's platforms is coming from TikTok.
> But last year, citing privacy concerns, Apple turned off IDFA by default and forced apps to ask people if they want to be tracked. It seems most do not: a study in December by AppsFlyer, an ad-tech company, suggested that 54% of Apple users who saw the prompt opted out.
Hard to believe that nearly half of all people is ok with being tracked...
Also this is 54% of people who saw the prompt. The standard practice for this sort of prompt in products that are trying to _optimise_ acceptance is to pre-ask the user first, almost "If we asked you if we can track you, would you be likely to accept". So that's 54% of users who are probably ok with the idea of personalised ads or however the app pitched it, then go on to say "actually no".
Essentially this number is far lower than the total population.
— Most apps nudge you to accept tracking before the dialog comes up. Probably influences some users
- A lot of people probably don’t even read the dialog properly.
- a lot of people who have apps like facebook installed are either unaware of the tracking stuff or don’t care
I believe that most people live relatively uneventful lives, and truly believe that they have nothing to hide from anyone, and resultantly do not value their own privacy whatsoever. The loss of privacy from surveillance capitalism does not bother them at all, and practically it is all upside, because they lost nothing of value to themselves.
It does not enter their minds that mass abandonment of privacy means that it renders privacy harder and harder, or even impossible, for the tiny minority of society that needs it to operate: human rights advocates, investigative journalists, labor organizers, political upstarts, et c.
On the contrary, they do realize that loss of privacy makes life harder for "troublemakers", and they see that as a benefit. Don't make the mistake of assuming that everyone shares your moral code.
The best comeback I've heard to that sentiment is, "would you like a camera in your bathroom?". And then the other night I was talking to my aunt and she mentioned that she has an Alexa in the bathroom so she can listen to music and I realized it might not be as good a retort as I thought.
I agree to an extent, but I think you're grossly oversimplifying the way that the average non-technical user views their privacy online. It's true that many people don't really care about advertisers tracking them, but they do care about other privacy-related aspects of their digital experience such as having their location tracked or the content of their communications monitored. As evidence of the latter, I present the enduring popularity of Signal and the fact that WhatsApp thought E2EE was an important enough feature to roll out across their entire user base.
The small minority of society that needs privacy (we should be honest and say that it includes some really nasty criminals as well as the good guys) really needs that kind of privacy, the kind that the average user is at least somewhat interested in. Ad-tracking isn't a huge concern to your average union organizer.
Snap is still somehow up 50% today. Google is similarly doing great. The problem is more on Facebook's end than Apple's. TikTok did way more damage than Apple ever could.
What they need to realize is that there are advantages _and_ responsibilities that come with sheer scale. Their apps are rife with misinformation and gaslighting.
Facebook has become associated with argument, fight and social misery in the minds of their consumers. They need to take some substantial steps to change that. Merely wishing these issues away with posts, launching new products or changing the company name does not cut it.
Readit News
Important to note about 60% of our customers are on an iOS device, which is a little higher than the global average but matches the market segment we are in in the UK.
The situation improved after about 4 weeks, I believe Facebook now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS, but it's somewhat difficult to be sure as by then we had other campaigns running.
So, this will definitely be effecting marketers decision making process of where to allocate spend. It certainly made us more courteous about spending on Facebook.
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-contrarian view is this: FB, Google have an unusual mix of large, medium and small advertisers all bidding for the same inventory. That's what makes FB and Google somewhat immune to large advertiser pricing pressures (and issue of the day spend bans). However, only the larger advertisers have budgets for complicated cross-publisher modeling. If organic FB tools show higher CPAs, it will drive the smaller marketers to other platforms causing some interesting feedback loops.
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 converted.
Personally we avoid the more invasive remarking tools as I hate it myself when you are chased across the web by a product you have looked at once.
>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...
Deleted Comment
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 are a few "fair" advertising companies (the name slips me) that I am perfectly happy with. A static, discreet ad need not be bad. Several ads are absolute works of art and passion. The vast majority are not.
What we have is (techy) folks wanting to not have a shitty experience, and the average privacy-conscious user not wanting tracking. Companies do not respect (or care enough) for these which is why you have an anti-ad point of view. (I should probably write about this.)
The implementation of ads is also wildly invasive, creepy, and propagandistic. However, focusing on implementation allows ad salesmen to lessen the sharpness of the criticism by supposing there is some "nice" way this could be done.
Second, how is this a "balanced ideological fight" counterargumnet. Let's say I oppose Facebook ads as invasion of privacy (and I do). A person on the internet used Facebook ads to make money. Those are contrary why? It's not like I'm sitting here and was like "oh, now that someone made money on the ads, I'm totally in favor of them."
We have a family friend, retired now, who had a successful career in marketing and strategy in multi-billion dollar transnational companies. I once asked (probably naively) why [maker of extremely popular product at the time] ran so little advertising. The friend told me "they have a good product. They don't need to spend money haranguing people into buying it or spreading the word about because it's actually good. Word of mouth is free".
Deleted Comment
Word-of-mouth exists. It's possible Facebook wasn't making it up. Did you use a Facebook-specific link in the ads?
True. However in this case we are confident, based on our own internal tracking and metrics, that this is correct.
I do sometimes find it odd that such a thing is insufficient for tracking sources of traffic in and of itself. No doubt there is a complexity that I have missed
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 "open in Safari/Chrome" option that tracking can be broken as there is no cookie. Ideally you want your visitor to either complete their transaction within the IAB or to use the "open in Safari" option immediately so that any tracking parameters are copied to the other browser allowing the cookie to be set.
In our case the majority of our customers will have a better experience outside of the IAB and so we have a popup that prompts them to use "open in Safari" before navigating away from the first page view. We actually implemented this after noticing a very high drop out rate for iOS Facebook IAB users during our checkout. What was happening is address/payment card autocomplete isn't available within the Facebook IAB and people were clicking "open in Safari" during the checkout in order to use it, they would then find themselves with an empty shopping cart, hence the drop out.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters
Is that even legal? With AI, you can never concretely prove anything, so you then have Facebook literally making up numbers it pinky swears are legit and billing you accordingly (semi-directly because while you're not paying per click, the landing page analytics are also used to weed out robo clicks and other fraud that you shouldn't be billed for).
I understand it's nice to have fancy reports etc but it sounds like you already know where your customers are coming from. And tracking is very invasive, in this case it doesn't really seem to add much value.
You could also ask your customers "where did you hear about us" for example. Perhaps you already do and that's the source of that 100%. If not you might even discover a way you didn't know of. Eg word of mouth, some obscure forum where your product was mentioned. As well as that it's a method where you respect your users' privacy.
We were in unique situation with this one campaign where, quite right, we knew where our conversions were coming from as we were confident there was no other source. Within a few weeks we had other campaigns running and no longer could have the same level of confidence.
The point it outside of this unique situate of a new product only marketed on Facebook the conversion attribution on their platform is broken. This is affecting marketers decision making process and reducing the spend on that platform.
The interesting thing is we were able to see the affect of Apples change quite clearly. Most people are not able to see that.
Affecting, not effecting.
>It certainly made us more courteous about spending on Facebook.
We assume you meant "cautious" and not "courteous".
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 dev was learning how to build Facebook apps. We wondered if we’d even really need a domain for much more than a landing page, if 99% of our engagement was going to come through Facebooks.
And then they killed it because they wanted to own the entire experience inside Facebook. It became not a walled garden, but a walled flower pot.
It always seemed short sighted to me. Yes, they lost control allowing third party apps in their frame. But didn’t they want to be a Microsoft and not a WordPerfect?
Looking back, I wonder if it was a missed opportunity. They have to go try to be the metaverse because social never became a platform.
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.
"Interesting but kind of tedious" is absolutely a great descriptor, though. It's basically an incremental game that grows at the slowest possible rate you can imagine.
If Zuck knowingly gave investors bad guidance, I don't think that would go over well with the SEC:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b-5#Forward-looking...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement
They did that to us yesterday: https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Facebook-is-Breaking-A...
We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on facebook app ads per month. We can deal with IDFA giving way to more aggregated attribution (we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure if the ads we paid for led to sales). But facebook breaking our app in production because they can't be bothered doing their job properly is very serious. It can't be solved by reducing ad spend, only by removing their SDK from our app.
If this is also happening to many other developers right now, that, more than the Q4 results or the IDFA issue itself, could be causing the drop in the share price.
In fact, if you look at the Q4 results, the earnings miss was more because of growth in G&A (which grew by 3 percentage-points of revenue if I'm not mistaken) than because of a top-line slowdown. And if you read the comments as to what made G&A grow, it's 'legal costs'.
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 specific user and are used to identify a single individual. The first one is short-lived, but obviously meant for tracking and the second one can be used for tracking, identifies a single individual and is long-lived.
edit: turning off my adblocker, some more appear.
_ga, _ga_4GMCF7E1GC, intercom-id-gpfdrxfd, notion_browser_id, amp_af43d4
none of these are listed or explained in your privacy policy.[1]
[1] - https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Sticky-Privacy-Policy-...
the fact that they're cracking down on partner privacy in a hamfisted way surely doesn't help matters but I can't see how angry devs are driving the share price down
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.
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 declining audience share and Facebook's own efforts to change what people see.
All Apple have done is allow users to say no.
They haven't even stopped anyone opting into surveillance if they want to. It just turns out that, when given the choice, people don't like being snooped on.
Snooping is a one off or occassional thing whereas continual obsessive profile building is actually stalking.
I mean it is sort of obvious to anybody not captured and with basic morals but such is the allure of greed that for ages people were cynically and hypocritically pretending otherwise
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.
Online targetted advertising is basically the current established way to find those people who actually would care about your special cheese grater and start to get your business going. If you're looking at alternatives those would be either untargetted online advertising (incredibly inefficient, only people who don't care about cheese graters would see your ads and that's your $5000 down the toilet) or real world advertising like... Door to door salesmen? Or take out fliers in your local newspaper? That's what people used to do
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.
Life would be pretty boring if we all only bought what we need.
Starting? Did these publishers not learn anything from the whole Facebook Video debacle? [1] Also, who at these companies thinks tying their core business to a single, third party is a good idea?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccu...
Good riddance, what a bunch of bottom feeders.
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?
Older people have more money to spend and are therefore worth more to advertisers.
Hard to believe that nearly half of all people is ok with being tracked...
Essentially this number is far lower than the total population.
— Most apps nudge you to accept tracking before the dialog comes up. Probably influences some users - A lot of people probably don’t even read the dialog properly. - a lot of people who have apps like facebook installed are either unaware of the tracking stuff or don’t care
It does not enter their minds that mass abandonment of privacy means that it renders privacy harder and harder, or even impossible, for the tiny minority of society that needs it to operate: human rights advocates, investigative journalists, labor organizers, political upstarts, et c.
The small minority of society that needs privacy (we should be honest and say that it includes some really nasty criminals as well as the good guys) really needs that kind of privacy, the kind that the average user is at least somewhat interested in. Ad-tracking isn't a huge concern to your average union organizer.
1. I get to use products and services I like without paying money from my wallet. I have plenty of data to share that’s effectively worthless to me.
2. I get exposed to new products and services (through ads) that I’d like to buy. I like buying things!
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Facebook has become associated with argument, fight and social misery in the minds of their consumers. They need to take some substantial steps to change that. Merely wishing these issues away with posts, launching new products or changing the company name does not cut it.