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> they'll accept that they will make less money as a result of this change If they're providing less engagement to content discovery from businesses in the feed, it increases the value of the traditional advertising on the platform. Perhaps their plan is expected to simultaneously push up the ad rates they can charge to access users, as an offset. It's also likely to increase the value of the content Facebook is going to curate/push on its own platform via Watch. They're going to build out a substantial streaming business in the coming years, rivaling YouTube. The user obviously has finite time, this will probably ultimately shift more engagement time to Watch, less time to stray business or media content. Overall it strikes me as a classic later stage of platform evolution. First you have an ecosystem with large numbers of external parties that are deriving immense value from the platform (whether businesses or developers or other). Then you eat the ecosystem, replacing it with your own systems and on-platform content. For example, instead of promoting a Craigslist (eBay, Poshmark, whatever) post, if you're Facebook you promote on-platform "marketplace" listings. Instead of an external YouTube post getting attention, that goes to Watch. By doing that, they technically fulfill their claimed plan (if only in their own opinion). Twitter, Microsoft Windows, eBay, Google, Netflix, nearly all platforms do this aggressively eventually. |