[alkonaut]

If sites can’t fund their content with ads based information I’m willing to give up, then they can beg me for money, or charge for the content, or beg me to look at ads or whatever. But I want that transaction to be transparent and deliberate. And I don’t care if 90% of content online just disappears because we click the privacy button. Then it was never a viable business model to begin with.

[rchaud]

> Then it was never a viable business model to begin with.

I think there's much more evidence to the contrary than there is for your position.

Facebook is absurdly, staggeringly profitable. Uber and WeWork by comparison are the BS business models, needing to break local laws and requiring nation-state levels of VC backing and still nowhere near profitability.

[alkonaut]

I didn’t mean “it doesn’t work” I mean it only works because one end of the transaction doesn’t really understand what they are paying, and if they did - they wouldn’t. That’s not viable. It’s similar to a business model that relies on people mistyping a search term or forgetting to cancel a subscription. It only “works” (is profitable) because of the lack of transparency

[ClumsyPilot]

>"Facebook is absurdly, staggeringly profitable."

Because it is stealing - the transactions were not voluntary and informed. most users are only now catching on to what they've been robbed of.

[rchaud]

Ad account managers do not care about impressions that the FB application reports (unless they're Coca-Cola or J&J). They care about the actual conversions, i.e. sales. Those are happening on their internal ecommerce platform, so those aren't stats FB can juice. You can see where the converting traffic is coming from.

If FB's targeting wasn't working, then nobody would have a reason to move away from paying Google and Bing to post ads on search results. FB and Google now own the online ads market, and FB got there in well under a decade.

[JKCalhoun]

Yes, if Facebook goes away due to lack of ads and no paid subscribers it means it simply was not worth paying for in enough people's minds.

Imagine that your entire business is only appealing to people if it is free.

I mean a lot of crappy 70's sitcoms would not exist if people had to buy tickets to watch. Honestly, I would not mind that world. :-)

[jfengel]

It seems that the news is only appealing to people when it's free. In part that's because it's competing with a lot of other things that are free -- including "news" subsidized by those who want to influence what news you consume.

People really like free. When it's there, it will tend to suck the air out of almost everything else. Including things that are almost-but-not-quite-free.

[JKCalhoun]

Yeah, I admit news might be the exception here.