[jp555]

Are clicks the majority of revenue for FB? An ad unit that fills a users screen for a few second as they scroll throughout the day every day is super super valuable to brand advertising. I think that’s ~$450 billion of the total ~$500 billion total annual global ad spend.

To me browsing the fb feed is a lot like like flipping through tv channels used to be. Brand advertising loved that too.

I’d think the More people browse their feeds the more valuable their ad unit becomes to brand advertisers.

[Avshalom]

Right I mean, driving a click through to a website due to rage has to be less profitable than driving a click through to say DeWalt power tools due to delight. Right? I mean some fraction of a fraction of of an ad for DeWalt must be worth less than keeping your friends pro DeWalt status update on top.

(This is not a paid ad for DeWalt but seriously, fucking DeWalt. Them and Stihl: just gorgeous power tools)

[matwood]

Haha. Yeah. My wife doesn't get it yet that when I pay a little extra for DeWalt it means I will not have to buy the same tool again for a very long time.

[jugg1es]

I wholeheartedly agree with this statement.

[adventured]

No question. The value of sales engines - driving sales referrals - as ecommerce in the US doubles over the next ~10 years (and in many developed economies), is extraordinary. If you want to make a billion dollars, build the next generation of sale referral monsters (RetailMeNot or Coupons.com being a primitive, unsophisticated first generation version; Groupon & Co were/are also primitive early sales referral engines).

A catalog is a concept, rather than a pile of printed paper as perhaps most people would think of it (ie thinking that catalogs died out with the rise of the Web). Historically catalogs pushed sales in all sorts of ways for all sorts of things, for eg the last 150 years in the US (and much longer elsewhere). As a concept, it's a sales referral system; it can either be internally owned (Sears Catalog) to drive content within eg a retailer's selection, or it can drive sales for external stray objects (whether tchotchkes or otherwise). The catalog business in the US was massive for a century. It's being rebuilt online right now. Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. are in part sales referral engines, there will be dozens of major platforms that perform that role, as it spreads to fill in every possible ecommerce niche.

All of these shops/brands/products coming online or being started from day one online, need a way to drive sales online (the more cost effectively the better). Taking a cut of that sales referral action will be dramatically more valuable than rage clicks for content on a random buzzfeed article or a paid click over to low value content on boredpanda and similar.

[hickeygareth]

Are your thoughts that Facebook et al would - instead of charging for an ad 'impression' - charge ecommerce sites a sales commission for the referral? (Disclaimer; I think/imagine they do this already to some extent, but it's not the main revenue driver.)

If this were the case, then it would absolutely be in Facebook's interest to present ads based on a persons likelihood of purchase (perhaps using a deep neural recommendations network (akin to YouTube's) to power it all).

[vl]

Of course they will make more money from this change:

It turns out that using ML to optimize for immediate engagement has two unintended side-effects: 1) it produces junkier content, 2) it decreases long-term retention. For obvious reasons, building a model to optimize for the long-term engagement is way harder and takes way more time.

While in the long run new model is more profitable (due to increased retention life-long engagement goes up), it decreases immediate engagement metrics. When this happens, major accounts start to call in and ask why now they are getting less for their dollar, thus this preemptive explanation by Mr Zuckerberg.

Then, when the dust settles and prices adjust, increased retention will compound and profits will go up.

[xefer]

How many people are aware that the list of interests directing Facebook ads are easily visible and editable?

Settings | Ads | Your Interests

It's really interesting to see the full scope of the interests FB has gathered over time. Some of them are pretty hilarious.

They have a seemingly huge ontology of every subject you could think of. If you methodically go through an remove every interest, the ads suddenly become very generic - stuff targeted to, say, age group and/or location. Since removing everything, and periodically clearing it all out, I generally only see stuff for things like real estate and car dealerships, which don't really mean much for me.

[macNchz]

I found Facebook’s idea of what my hobbies are to be particularly amusing: https://m.imgur.com/nWCWn63

It’s unclear where they got those from, or why those are even allowed to be considered hobbies.

I don’t use Facebook much these days, but I’ve had an account for nearly 13 years, I use Instagram regularly and they surely have lots of tracking pixel data on me...so I was suprised at how poorly they’d inferred my interests (the other categories were less farcical but not especially accurate).

[jp555]

Generally people only consider ads that “don’t mean much to me” as ads. If they do mean something to someone they suddenly cease being ads to that person. It’s a weird thing.

[dhoulb]

I did the same and filled it with things that are relevant to me, and now my ads are generally enjoyable — things I might not have otherwise known about.

There was a lot of cruft in there from the early days when it was easy to like everything. But after the cleanout my ads are definitely better.