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by rchaud 1805 days ago
> 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.
2 comments
alkonaut 1805 days ago
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
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ClumsyPilot 1805 days ago
>"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.

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rchaud 1805 days ago
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.

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