> Facebook’s change will open up more online ad space for it to sell, although Mr. Bosworth said that wasn’t the motivation for the move. Facebook now garners 84% of its advertising revenue from mobile devices, which are less susceptible to ad blocking than desktop devices.
Something about it being difficult for a man to understand something when his salary depends on it seems appropriate here.
This is what happens when a company becomes big enough to not have to care very much about what their users think. Look at what Google has done on their search site. More than half the visible page is adds now.
Facebook now believes that users won't abandon them and they can really start to use/abuse their position to increase their revenue. They in essence have called their users bluff and said even though there is alot of talk about hating ads and leaving, they don't believe that users will really quit the site because of this.
I'm willing to bet that Facebook is correct here. I'm an investor.
Does this really generate anything for Facebook though long term? These companies seem to forget that the best blocking technology is the human brain, and serving us more and more BS we don't want/have any interest in isn't going to make the advertisers more money, just Facebook. That's fine for now but eventually they're going to catch on.
This has been a cold war arms race for years now, websites pile in more and more ads, ruin the experience, clutter the content and people just ignore harder and harder, either with actual ad blocking technology or just by knowing exactly what's an ad and what's the actual content and filtering accordingly.
My point is, eventually the advertisers are going to pick up on the fact that an impression to a pissed off reader isn't worth anything, even the rock bottom prices they currently pay. This model is dying and Facebook/Google are in hardcore denial about it.
I only have a sample size of one (me), but I left a couple of years ago and you're not getting me back with an attitude like this... I can't imagine I'm the only one, however, I'm also willing to bet that you're right often enough for this tactic to increase profits.
> Facebook now believes that users won't abandon them and they can really start to use/abuse their position to increase their revenue.
I read that Facebook experimented with injecting random crashes in their Android and iOS apps to measure how much app stability affected user retention and usage. The answer was there was no effect! People wanted to use Facebook so much that the experiment's random crashes did not deter them.
Something about it being difficult for a man to understand something when his salary depends on it seems appropriate here.
This is what happens when a company becomes big enough to not have to care very much about what their users think. Look at what Google has done on their search site. More than half the visible page is adds now.
Facebook now believes that users won't abandon them and they can really start to use/abuse their position to increase their revenue. They in essence have called their users bluff and said even though there is alot of talk about hating ads and leaving, they don't believe that users will really quit the site because of this.
I'm willing to bet that Facebook is correct here. I'm an investor.