To me browsing the fb feed is a lot like like flipping through tv channels used to be. Brand advertising loved that too.
I’d think the More people browse their feeds the more valuable their ad unit becomes to brand advertisers.
To me browsing the fb feed is a lot like like flipping through tv channels used to be. Brand advertising loved that too.
I’d think the More people browse their feeds the more valuable their ad unit becomes to brand advertisers.
(This is not a paid ad for DeWalt but seriously, fucking DeWalt. Them and Stihl: just gorgeous power tools)
A catalog is a concept, rather than a pile of printed paper as perhaps most people would think of it (ie thinking that catalogs died out with the rise of the Web). Historically catalogs pushed sales in all sorts of ways for all sorts of things, for eg the last 150 years in the US (and much longer elsewhere). As a concept, it's a sales referral system; it can either be internally owned (Sears Catalog) to drive content within eg a retailer's selection, or it can drive sales for external stray objects (whether tchotchkes or otherwise). The catalog business in the US was massive for a century. It's being rebuilt online right now. Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. are in part sales referral engines, there will be dozens of major platforms that perform that role, as it spreads to fill in every possible ecommerce niche.
All of these shops/brands/products coming online or being started from day one online, need a way to drive sales online (the more cost effectively the better). Taking a cut of that sales referral action will be dramatically more valuable than rage clicks for content on a random buzzfeed article or a paid click over to low value content on boredpanda and similar.
If this were the case, then it would absolutely be in Facebook's interest to present ads based on a persons likelihood of purchase (perhaps using a deep neural recommendations network (akin to YouTube's) to power it all).
It turns out that using ML to optimize for immediate engagement has two unintended side-effects: 1) it produces junkier content, 2) it decreases long-term retention. For obvious reasons, building a model to optimize for the long-term engagement is way harder and takes way more time.
While in the long run new model is more profitable (due to increased retention life-long engagement goes up), it decreases immediate engagement metrics. When this happens, major accounts start to call in and ask why now they are getting less for their dollar, thus this preemptive explanation by Mr Zuckerberg.
Then, when the dust settles and prices adjust, increased retention will compound and profits will go up.
Settings | Ads | Your Interests
It's really interesting to see the full scope of the interests FB has gathered over time. Some of them are pretty hilarious.
They have a seemingly huge ontology of every subject you could think of. If you methodically go through an remove every interest, the ads suddenly become very generic - stuff targeted to, say, age group and/or location. Since removing everything, and periodically clearing it all out, I generally only see stuff for things like real estate and car dealerships, which don't really mean much for me.
It’s unclear where they got those from, or why those are even allowed to be considered hobbies.
I don’t use Facebook much these days, but I’ve had an account for nearly 13 years, I use Instagram regularly and they surely have lots of tracking pixel data on me...so I was suprised at how poorly they’d inferred my interests (the other categories were less farcical but not especially accurate).
There was a lot of cruft in there from the early days when it was easy to like everything. But after the cleanout my ads are definitely better.