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.
I think this covers how it's supposed to work, but the reality is far messier and worse. In particular, the hypothetical cheese grater manufacturer would probably be have to pay Google to advertise on their own brand name adword so a generic competitor doesn't steal customers that already know about their great cheese graters. Oh, and about 90% of the people who see your cheese grater ads would be people who just bought one of your cheese graters. Even worse, cheesegraterreviews.com would be paid off by your (larger) competitors to review their cheese graters better and this site has much better SEO than forums.graterenthusiasts.com so they would list higher in organic cheese grater search.
All of this is to say that targeted advertising for niche, high-quality brands is only viable (at least if you're targeting someone like me) in an environment where search isn't beshitted by SEO, Google doesn't run a trademark protection racket, and reviews aren't 90% noise. Unfortunately, that's not the world we find ourselves in. At this point I'm more likely to just go to the kitchen store and physically examine cheese graters to find one I like than relying on the internet.
You are right of course, it's not a perfect situation and, yes, many times may still not be able to get your cheese grater off the ground. My question remains though - if you are not allowed targeted advertising, what practical alternatives do you have to mass market your useful product?
We are not looking at this from the point of view of your personal preference where you would rather the product was in a store already, but from the point of view of a legitimate, useful small business which does not have access to a store and which is trying to match their product to consumers.
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 single time.
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 or not.
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 should not be superseded by someone's "need" (though I think "desire" would be more apt there) to get the word out about their product.
Privacy is incredibly useful to society, as is advertising I suppose, so I'm not quite sure how you can have a conversation about targeted advertising's societal usefulness without also talking about the impact it has to other things that are useful to society, eg privacy, that that advertising depends on.
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.
We should advertise cheese graters to people who search “good cheese graters” instead of trying to track people across the web panopticon-style and cross reference if they are a) moving houses b) making a cheese-based dish c) friends with chefs or cooks d) planning a dinner party e) physically located in a kitchen goods store.
What the heck is the world's best cheese grater? Some products are effectively "finished" and the best there is already exists and we don't need your new business.
Traditionally, cookware and kitchenware makers targeted restaurant buyers. If you think you have a great product, go to a restaurant conference. Everyone there has publicly expressed an interest in what you're selling without requiring a global corporate panopticon.
1. I see an ad for some really nice pens. COOL!
2. I go to a website that allows me to opt out of tracking but I'd have to opt out of their 300 affiliates one at a time.
3. The privacy policies that state: we do not honor do-not-track signals because we don't know if it was the user or a browser 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.
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.
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.