”We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else.”
Bullshit. Meta's whole business is predation on user's attention. If I am scrolling their stupid page, then I am not scrolling some other stupid page. This is as zero-sum as it gets.
This is not even contestable. Google and FB took the advertising money from everyone else. Businesses still pay (and always have) the same % in advertising, only it's 2 monopolies now instead of thousands of media.
I'm no fan of ads, but I would still contest that. The pre-Internet advertising arsenal was all remarkably blunt weapons (newspaper ads, TV, radio, direct mail) that made targeting very difficult and were out of reach or not economic for countless businesses. Now anybody can buy precisely targeted impressions for any keyword under the sun and very closely track their performance, opening up entirely new markets.
I'm not a fan of these new markets. We got by just fine with simple, static ads that weren't spying on everyone. It gave rise to local, niche publications that were a heck of a lot more interesting than today's one-size-fits-all social media junk.
And with that, millions and billions of users get profiled, their private information taken away and processed by those two companies, as ads get embedded into everything (even lockscreens it seems)
There is no such thing as 'blunt' or sharp weapon, the market shows that all advertising has some efficacy (around 1% but nobody knows how much precisely). Internet advertising did not increase overall consumption, thus it is not more effective than the sum of previous media.
Anyway the biggest trick BigTech played was not that it hypnotized the masses, but that they convinced advertisers that they are better than everyone
Internet advertising did not increase overall consumption...
Genuine questions: how do we know that? how do we measure that?
My own anecdotical evidence is that I consume different things. Anyway, would more effective advertising increase overall consumption? I would expect that it increases consumption of specific, tailored, targetted in detriment of generic.
Before deciding if "opening up new markets" is necessarily good we'd need to ask what kinds of markets it opened up. Most of what I see are content farms flooding search engines with SEO garbage, scammy businesses that sell poor knock-off products, and predatory ad tech. I'd prefer it if those markets had never been opened.
> Businesses still pay (and always have) the same % in advertising
That's completely false. A lot of small businesses (think housewifes selling cupcakes) were not viable before Google and especially Facebook/Instagram — they simply could not realistically find their consumers before internet advertising.
Most of those ads were free "back in my days" here.. you got a "postcard" in each of those magazines, and could post an ad (limited length, text only) for free... how do you thing people sold cars before the internet?
And yes, facebook is more cost effective, because people don't get paid for their data... if people got paid for viewing ads and having their data gathered (like they used to be, market research groups and all that), the cost would be a lot different.
>how do you thing people sold cars before the internet?
You're not following the particular context of your subthread and inadvertently moving the goalposts.
The side conversation you're replying to was niche businesses with niche customers e.g. gp's example of "small businesses (think housewifes selling cupcakes)"
Buying ad space in a local newspaper is a waste of money for _small_ businesses like that because the subset of readers interested in paying for homemade cupcakes is too tiny. There's a threshold where it's just not financially feasible to pay $$$ targeted at a general audience in the hopes of converting the subset of that audience into customer revenue.
On the other hand, cars are purchased by everybody and the profit margins are also higher to get a return-on-investment when spending for ads in local newspapers.
Mabye a better example than housewife cupcakes is the niche video educational content on Youtube that's supported by advertising. The niche videos from Animagraffs, Practical Engineering, etc with micro-audiences wouldn't be economically viable on traditional network tv or even PBS. It required the long-tail of the internet matching the marketplace of viewers + creators + advertisers.
Ah, but back in the day the local newspapers had "classified ads" section (still do, I imagine, but probably wildly useless these days) which many folks read religiously seeking out those small niche business things and local deals and such, and placing a short little text ad there was often literal "pocket change" to run for a day or three.
There was a brief golden period where those housewives selling cupcakes had their moments in the sun. But at this point they're mostly outcompeted by AliExpress tier knock-offs of anything innovative they do or other VC backed would-be monopolists, like Grubhub and Yelp, outcompeting them for eyeballs with superior SEO and keyword targeting.
Almost none of the local restaurants near me even have their own websites anymore because they get no hits. Yelp, Google, and GrubHub/UberEats type sites have hollowed it all out.
Many successful small internet businesses actually arose from the era before internet advertising.
They simply took their product expertise and brought it online and expanded their reach to more customers through advertising.
As for housewives selling cupcakes - that business is just as not viable offline as it is online. It simply doesn't scale and shipment/delivery will eat your entire profit margin. It might make some beer/fun money, but it's not a business, it's a hobby.
Since the article comes from a “crypto”-related site, perhaps I can make a metaphoric (& mildly schizophrenic) response without getting downvoted. Google is USD and Meta wants to be Gold. The % of businesses that accept mainstream currencies have always been the same. What’s left are businesses that people still find socially unacceptable.
I think Facebook consumed non-monetized life activities. So instead of doing free things IRL, people started browsing and scrolling. So it was zero sum for attention but not for economic value.
I think Zuckerberg was right in that Facebook didn’t take market away from others, they created a new market. At least 12 years ago.
I share your distaste for Meta/FB; however, if their investment to advance the 'meta-verse' leads them to invent technologies that end up being used in different contexts by other companies/industries (charting more of the uncharted map), then all the better.
Given the impact of FaceBook on political and media systems, I think that this a strongly negative sum game. Spreading "junk food news" and other lurid conspiratorial stories is a negative externality, like venting pollution.
Bullshit. Meta's whole business is predation on user's attention. If I am scrolling their stupid page, then I am not scrolling some other stupid page. This is as zero-sum as it gets.