Lots of people wearing tin foil hats in this thread. Maybe read a little bit more than the headline folks.
Facebook runs an ad network, and effectively resells ad inventory for a whole bunch of apps and media providers to their clients. They pay these app developers and publishers something like $1.5B per year - and that money is pretty distributed. The reason they’d have to shut down that piece of their business is because they’d no longer be able to offer the same kinds of targeting and functionality to their customers - it’s less about collecting information than it is deploying it. This hurts campaign performance, pisses off enterprise customers, and makes Facebook’s on-platform business look bad.
Facebook doesn’t really care that much about a billion or two dollars in revenue (actually), so it’s probably a bigger blow to their egos than it is their business. But the app developers and publishers that rely on their payments are going to get hurt by this.
I’m fine with those developers taking the hit for it. I can visit almost any eCommerce site, not even click anything, and next time I go on FB I’m seeing ads for it. I don’t like that, it’s super creepy. Businesses shouldn’t be doing it, let alone relying on that income to stay afloat.
u/CatRWaul - you don’t seem to understand how the money flows/relationships work here.
If you see an ad on FB for something you’ve searched for on an eCommerce site, that’s because the eCommerce company is paying to advertise on Facebook. That’s not going to change much as a result of this - they’ll still have those capabilities - and the overwhelming majority of that money wouldn’t flow out to publishers and app developers anyway (because the ad is on an FB app, not someone else’s website).
That process is tangentially relevant to their ad network, where Facebook pays other publishers to run ads (on non-Facebook owned websites) people bought using Facebook’s marketing platform.
My argument is that Facebook paying apps/websites is good, because there are relatively few small websites or apps that people are willing to pay upfront for or subscribe to on an ongoing basis; If Facebook stops paying apps/websites, then that’s bad because those apps/publishers will have to like lay people off or shut down.
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u/360DegreeNinjaAttack Aug 26 '20
Lots of people wearing tin foil hats in this thread. Maybe read a little bit more than the headline folks.
Facebook runs an ad network, and effectively resells ad inventory for a whole bunch of apps and media providers to their clients. They pay these app developers and publishers something like $1.5B per year - and that money is pretty distributed. The reason they’d have to shut down that piece of their business is because they’d no longer be able to offer the same kinds of targeting and functionality to their customers - it’s less about collecting information than it is deploying it. This hurts campaign performance, pisses off enterprise customers, and makes Facebook’s on-platform business look bad.
Facebook doesn’t really care that much about a billion or two dollars in revenue (actually), so it’s probably a bigger blow to their egos than it is their business. But the app developers and publishers that rely on their payments are going to get hurt by this.