Meta Myths
Meta, née Facebook, is now, incredibly enough, worth 42% less than it was when I wrote Facebook Lenses, hitting levels not seen since January 2016. It seems the company’s many critics are finally right: Facebook is dying, for real this time.
The problem is that the evidence just doesn’t support this point of view. Forget five lenses: there are five myths about Meta’s business that I suspect are driving this extreme reaction; all of them have a grain of truth, so they feel correct, but the truth is, if not 100% good news, much better than most of those dancing on the company’s apparent grave seem to realize.
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ATT severed that connection between Meta’s ads on one side, and conversions on the other, by labeling the latter as third party data and thus tracking (never mind that none of the data was collected by the app maker or merchant, who were more than happy to deputize Meta for ad-related data collection). This not only made the company’s ads less valuable, it also made them more uncertain[…]
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What ATT did not do, though, was kill digital advertising. There are still plenty of ads on Facebook, and mostly not from traditional advertisers from the analog world: entire industries have developed online over the last fifteen years in particular, built for a reality where the entire world as addressable market makes niche products viable in a way they never were previously — as long as the seller can find a customer. Meta is still the best option for that sort of top-of-the-funnel advertising, which is why the company still took in $27 billion in advertising last quarter. Moreover, the fact that number was barely down year-over-year speaks to the fact that digital advertising is still growing strongly: yes, ATT lopped off a big chunk of revenue, but it is not as if Meta revenue actually decreased by $10 billion annually[…]
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I personally think one of the drivers of the decline of social platforms (and not just Meta/Facebook) is the amount of image crafting you have to do in order to live online without consequence.
Instagram makes this easiest (even if it is more fake)... it's really easy to post your life, while also insulating yourself from the rest of the world. It's the only social media platform I use these days.
