Testing Ads in Facebook Messenger
messengerblog.com
messengerblog.com
You know what I can use text anyone, anytime without having to worry about ads? My phone.
I feel like there's a downward trend of companies using free stuff to "hook" people and then just feed them an inferior product over and over and over again (more ads, etc). It's not just creating worse products, but it's creating worse customers (who don't understand actual costs when they see other products that are "free").
What happened to just "paying for x, get x." As a customer, I miss those business models and as a business, I miss those customers.
Open, decentralized, accessible, and not locked in to some vendors shitty whims. I get why people don't like it, but until we come up with a good distributed and decentralized alternative, I'll stick with email thank.
You meet someone. You want to follow up with them, for whatever reason. Most people have a public enough profile on Facebook that Messenger is the obvious answer. And, like Facebook, "everyone" is on it. Even if they conduct their more personal and intimate social media interaction on other platforms. To "reach out and touch someone", ping them on FB/Messenger.
Not saying I like giving FB that position. But, they currently appear to indeed have and dominate it.
P.S. A frequent circumstance is a friend or acquaintance of a friend or a coworker. Someone at a party. Etc. Your respective social graphs are already grazing if not overlapping, so connecting the dots on FB is trivial.
Of course I don't like that it's controlled by FB, because I hate FB, but I'm probably going to keep using it until it's replaced by another free social media platform that 'everyone' is on by default.
I'm using an app (messenger?) that just puts a slightly better UI on Android texting, but it's still pretty bad. I should look into using Telegram, though.
By far the biggest gripe with texting is that it's not persistent across devices. That's a core requirement that seems like it should have been solved a decade ago.
I ask as a fellow Google-avoider; I think your competing requirements are asking for an impossible thing.
I dont like many of those business models. Its basically push everybody out of game by offering a great product for free and then when nobody is there make it worse.
This sure opens a space for a new player, but this new player will just play the same game ( offer something for free then make it worse and so on )
In such a unique platform such as Messenger you could get a bit more creative. One such example: Suggested pages to message. This would get companies leads and keep people on the Messenger platform. This might not be the best use, but with this product, Facebook can do better than just a re-skin of mobile banners.
Invariably Facebook's ads are either a) highly non-relevant [the vast majority of ads], or b) I already know about what they're advertising. I even try to help, to make the ads relevant: every so often, I go through Facebook's list of my interests to weed out the many ridiculous inferences Facebook has made about me. I bet that's more than 99% of the Facebook population does!
- I get too much spam, so I tend to check email less. - It's not as "real time" as I sometimes need it to be. Sill feels more like mail than like conversation. - I like to know when people read my messages (I know there's apps that allow this, but it's not ubiquitous) - I like to know when people are typing (aka, are currently in the conversation) - Different email programs send/format emails differently. Some seem to keep all the replies attached to the bottom of the latest message in a way my email program can't figure out and collapse.
I'm a fan of email tbh, and I wish more resources were invested in making it better, but I just don't think it lies in the same "space" as instant messaging.
For XMPP I recommend Conversations (https://conversations.im/) as client on Android and ChatSecure as iOS client (https://chatsecure.org/). An simple easy to use server implementation is Prosody (https://prosody.im/), but ejabberd (https://www.ejabberd.im/) is a good choice too. There are also multiple public servers if you don't want to run your own server instance, for example the XMPP server run by DuckDuckGo (https://duck.co/help/community-platform/xmpp).
For Matrix Riot is the best client implementation which runs on multiple platforms (https://riot.im/). The (afaik) only usable server implementation is the reference implementation (https://matrix.org/), but at some future point the currently pre-alpha Rust-based Ruma implementation (https://www.ruma.io/) could be a good choice too.
A nice thing about XMPP is that server-based transports can provide gateway-functionality to other networks. For example with Spectrum (http://spectrum.im/) it's possible to use your XMPP client of choice to chat with your friends that use Facebook Messenger.
It's looking like my best option is to buy an iPhone for an iMessage/Signal one-two punch.
Yes, people hate ads. But, if you were Facebook, what would you do differently?
Zuckerberg's genius was to realise that their primary objective is to create an engagement platform and gradually move towards monetisation; grand vision, or plain luck, it's working marvellously.
Guess it doesn't matter then. I'm rarely in the messenger homescreen, but when I am, those are just as annoying as ads anyway, with no way to remove them permanently (which they gleefully tell you when you hide them).
I just use the web version and set it to desktop so it doesn't try and nerf the site.
There is still a small possibility that they'll renege on this plan. Google, whose rivalry with Facebook in the area of messaging is longstanding [5], has largely squandered their potential in this space with a confusing product strategy, but have remained a dominant force in advertising thanks to Search, Youtube, Maps, and Android. Google has recently shuffled up its messaging lineup again by rebooting Google Voice, still having Hangouts, and pushing Duo and Allo, but Facebook provides a unified experience by having all of this in one app. Facebook is no doubt gambling on the fact that any user fallout about ads in Messenger won't be severe enough to cause an exodus of users to a competitor who poses a threat -- and right now, it's unclear if Google poses a threat or just continues to flail ineptly.
Meanwhile, Snapchat doesn't pose a serious risk to Messenger, because Instagram has suitably cloned all of its features while also retaining the core product around curated photos; WhatsApp is a serious player in Brazil and India, is of course now run by Facebook in a brilliant example of market positioning; Skype has hemorrhaged marketshare due to Microsoft's (mis-)management; a few other smaller players target niche audiences (e.g. pseudonymous harder-to-monetize users, gamers, privacy-conscious users).
This leaves their biggest threats European and Asian-operated platforms like WeChat, LINE, Viber, and Telegram. WeChat dominates the Chinese market due to various home turf advantages, while Telegram is popular in the Cyrillic world and MENA, Viber in Europe and Israel, and LINE in Japan. So far, none of them have challenged Facebook in its core markets.
[1] http://www.tnsglobal.com/thailand-digital-ad-spend-report [2] https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Facebook-Ad-Spending-Domin... [3] http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-around-the-wo... [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-... [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483