[lvl100]

Problem with Facebook is that they can’t acquire anyone due to their notoriety. They should have been able to use all the cash generated in the past five years to purchase a bunch of assets like Microsoft. At the end of the day, they have a bad branding problem. Need a fresh start with new management which we know is never going to happen.

[ajkjk]

Not a fresh start necessarily. What they need is (a) changing how they're run and what their goals are (which apparently hasn't happened) and (b) sending honest signals [1] thay they have done so.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

[lvl100]

I will make it simple: they need to buy Stripe/Shopify. They really need to own e-commerce vertical.

[donsupreme]

Should've done that in the past 2 years, now that Lina Khan is the head of FTC no way it will be approved.

[ajkjk]

Well hopefully they don't, y'know.

[donsupreme]

They did use all that money to overpay market value for a lot of engineers, data scientist, etc. They were particularly aggressive the past 2 years during the pandemic, but a lot of those hires are now getting paid 20% less on their overall comp.

[vmception]

That’s not really why the market is reacting here, thats an old story as the potential monetization phase has already been replaced by actual monetization. The new story is that a bunch less people are willing to spend on ads at all, specifically citing broad market constrained budgets due to inflation and supply chain issues. This is a heavy indication of the state of many sectors, pretty fascinating ripple.

Also Apple protecting consumers and democracy from ad targeting is working, at least against Facebook.

[dktp]

> The new story is that a bunch less people are willing to spend on ads at all, specifically citing broad market constrained budgets due to inflation and supply chain issues

To be fair, Alphabet had a solid top and bottom beat attributed to ads revenue, citing increased spending on ads (mostly in retail, finance, travel)

[vmception]

I had noticed that, good point. Facebook is dependent on their apps being able to broker and target ads.

Maybe advertisers were getting less good results from their campaigns or were chilled by knowing that Apple would break the targeting ability of the Facebook ad platform.

Maybe there is overrepresentation of advertisers that use iphone and saw the crusade occurring, and that got them to avoid ad platforms that rely on that level of tracking.

[Melatonic]

Facebook has the cash to buy Microsoft?

I do not want to see that happen