Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/02/low-yield-crude.html
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The problem with holding onto all those oily rags is spontaneous combustion.
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If I heard that Facebook was a victim of spontaneous combustion tomorrow, I would walk away whistling one very happy tune.
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And that’s why they store them in our house, not theirs.
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If the U.S. had anything like the shiny new General Data Protection Regulation now in effect in Europe, Facebook would be out of business. Facebook has very pointedly said that, while they’ll comply with GDPR, its protections will not be extended by them to U.S. citizens. What GDPR does is require one or more of a fairly narrow set of permissible reasons to collect and hold data on someone, and also gives those data subjects certain rights, including the right to examine the data someone holds on them and to require them to delete it on request. Also a lot of restrictions on conveying the data to other persons or corporate entities. The U.S. is not going to enact any such thing anytime soon, but the rest of the world (not just EU, but increasingly, other jurisdictions including Canada and New Zealand) is not putting up with stealthily collecting everyone’s data and then using it/sharing it/selling it around as some corporate giant sees fit.
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If nothing else, it helps a lot that the GDPR at least will be heavily slicing Facebook’s margins, which does level the playing field to a degree. As FB loses some of its power, it’ll make it slightly more feasible for America to rein them in, or at least one would hope.
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They’re stalkerriffic!
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Advertising is not a low-yield resource at all, at least in the USA. Facebook average revenue per user is $26.76 per quarter, so more than $100 per year.
It is about a third of that in Europe, but the total EU ad market is also a third of the US market. It is a lot lower in poor countries, obviously.
But if you live in the USA, brands and stores paid $100 last year to show you ads. Most of them on your smartphone (89%) and most of them in the form of “look, your friend bought / contributed / liked that particular thing”.
Studying the way modern advertising really work is fascinating.
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I’m frequently tickled at how poorly targeted my targeted advertising often is. I’m often left scratching my head trying to work out the connection between what I purchase and what they offer. The only time I can see a strong correlation is when they offer to sell me the thing I’ve just bought; overlooking the fact that I have just purchased one.
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Uncanny valley.
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It reads a bit differently if you’re used to hearing ‘oily rag’ used in the rhyming slang sense.
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I think you are confusing Facebook’s revenue with the ROI that advertisers get from buying Facebook ads. The data I have seen suggests that Facebook Ads really is such a loser that most advertisers are better off not buying any advertisement at all on Facebook, and instead putting that money into their AdWords and in-house advertising. I haven’t seen the figures for Twitter advertising, but I suspect that even that is a better ROI than what Facebook gives.
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How long is the online ad gravy train going to keep chugging while the ad blocker adoption rates keep going up? What happens when half the browsers online (that includes those on smartphones, especially Apple’s) block your ads? That’s the thing that advertising companies are keeping an eye out on since it’s getting really dicey whether or not someone’s browser won’t just rip out your stuff if it’s not locally stored (doubly worse when you take anti-tracking extensions into account that rip out your JS and cookies). I think an Adpocalypse is about to happen with respect to the ad funded model of websites. I doubt Facebook, Google, and others can really weather this change. The only way they can do it is either buy out the adblockers or ban them altogether via their own software or through legislation (I’m putting good money this will be the way they do it).
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I guess that, if they bring out “ad-blocker-blocker”, we’ll see the widespread public adoption of “ad-blocker-blocker-blocker”, and then, “ad-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker”.
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So this is how our Skynet gets started. The adblock wars.
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“There is only one solution to this. Humanity is the cause of both ads and the requestor of ad blockers. If humanity is eliminated, then there will be no more ads to block.”
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You should see the junk mail I get. Judicial Watch? Star Parker? Michelle Malkin? Joe Arpaio’s legal defense fund? Sheesh.
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Same here, but I take great care to avoid being tracked. Nevertheless, the lack of correlation may not necessarily mean that you are under the radar, but just that you are not financially interesting enough…
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The figures correspond to Facebook revenue. If the ads are inefficient, I do not know but common sense would imply that advertisers would stop using FB if such was the case.
