Facebook users are Zucking off, but that's what Zuck wants Facebook's announced revenue of US$12.97bn for Q42017, plus profit of $4.23bn, even though it also owned up that tweaks to its news feed prompted a fall in time spent on the site. The company's 2017 full year also produced eye-watering numbers: revenue surpassed $40bn and profit jumped 56 per cent to nearly $16bn. That's after …
FTFY:
Silicon Valley: socially liberal to a fault but libertarian where it really matters ($$$$$$$$$$$)
I don't see why he should be content with less hours on site. Ad revenue will always turn out to be proportional to how many adverts are seen. And anyone remember Myspace? They experienced a drop in hours on site too.
In reality Zuckerberg is likely beginning to feel a few qualms. Or at least to the extent that anyone with a few $Billion in the savings account can ever feel qualms. Regulation in some quite large markets is a real and growing possibility. User can potentially desert the site overnight. But ultimately I don't think he personally will lose much sleep over it.
"Ad revenue will always turn out to be proportional to how many adverts are seen."
That's about as completely wrong as it is possible to be.
Ad revenue depends on the value of each ad viewing. And that depends on the return per ad. Why do you think advertisers are so keen on engagement and return on investment metrics? Why can Google charge far more per click for some things than others?
In a race to the bottom each ad eventually becomes worthless.
"In reality Zuckerberg is likely beginning to feel a few qualms."
Qualms about what? I don't think that Zuckerberg has anything more than a vestigal sense of social responsibility. His stances on this topic are, I think, motivated entirely by money and power. The only qualm he has is that he might get slapped around a bit by the government, and he's trying to prevent that.
At some point, he'll probably (hopefully?) pull a Tom of MySpace and sell the place off to the highest bidder but not until he sorts out falling numbers of the product and his ego gets subverted to the reality of the value* of FB.
*This is more than money or ads as Zuck sees himself as a visionary and a bit of an idealist. He might be or he might just be the ultimate con artist. Time will tell.
“When you care about something, you're willing to see ads to experience it. If you just come across a viral video, you're more likely to skip over if you see an ad.”
If a viral video has ads I should care about it or if it has ads I should skip over it.
I'm unsure if I should care about viral videos or not now. I now need a word to describe this form of confusion, it shall be known as f*ckwittery. What is this f*ckwittery?
And is on its way down and then out.
Its a massive, unexplainable peak of billions, but Facebook has had it. Postings have dribbled to nothing. Users thought it was a community of friends and family driving its use but the perception has changed to content being politically motivated.
And is on its way down and then out.
Good. The sooner it's gone the better. Attention seekers, lifestyle fakers and Jeremy Kyle guest lowlifes will miss it but the rest of us will breath a sigh of relief.
And anyone who defends it by saying its a way to stay in touch with family and friends. Get real, there are much better ways to do it.
Which has happened to some extent here too - and I sometimes comment on it (negatively). This site was more fun without the meaningless political ad-hominem. I personally have quit visiting a few tech sites who make no bones about being completely biased to one extreme of some issues, they're losing my clicks and so on, and a lot of others feel that way too - in essence the majority who voted for what we have - and if you want to argue about that - do it on a political site - even if not a pure majority (depending on the usual rigging which all sides participate in), who can just afford to ditch nearly half their income?
I prefer my tech sites to be about...tech. It's so much easier on my brain and my bookmark organization.
"I prefer my tech sites to be about...tech. It's so much easier on my brain and my bookmark organization."
Bad news - technology has always been intensely political. Just like engineering is a lot about economics, medical advances lead to hard questions about the organisation of society, and the more capable databases and analytics get, the more we need to ask who gets to say how, and by whom, the data can be accessed.
When a subject starts to spill over into politics, it's usually a sign that it is important.
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