Hacker News Reader

Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

Remarkable? Perplexing. Like facebook revenues up while all companies are slashing their marketing budget.

Regarding Facebook ads: We are in the throes of a general election cycle, I'm curious how much of the slack that has been picking up. Anecdotally I am seeing tons of political ads across the internet.

I am also curious if increased internet usage in general is compensating for lower PPC as people are stuck at home.

How has Twitter's ad revenue gone? They made the policy to eschew political advertising, so they could serve as a (somewhat imperfect) control group. On the other hand, they also haven't had a high-profile advertiser pull-out like Facebook did either.

In Q2, as the COVID-19 pandemic had companies cutting ad spending across the board, Twitter's revenue fell short of analysts' expectations, falling 19% YOY, and earnings also failed to meet expectations. The one bright spot was that its number of average monetizable daily active users was 186 million, higher than expected. Twitter's stock is up 5.8% at time of writing.

https://www.investopedia.com/twitter-earnings-4706523

On the ubiquitous political ads, I had to fax something to my doctor last month. I didn't want to subscribe to something to send a single fax and all the fax services that I might have used were unavailable thanks to the lockdown. I found a service that offered free faxing with an ad on the cover sheet. I didn't think twice about it and sent the ad. The confirmation page also had an ad on it. For Trump/Pence. Now I'm terrified that the same ad was on the fax and I'm going to need to get a new doctor.

You just had an entire planet told that they were going to stay at home, and that school-age children needed some type of device to learn through. That must have driven some percentage of new sales.

Not to mention things like Bowdoin providing iPad Pros with Magic Pencil and Magic keyboard to all their students (plus paying for cellular connectivity for those students who need it). I imagine this is going to have a knock-on effect where this becomes a quasi-standard setup for remote education improving Apple's bottom line going forward.

https://www.bowdoin.edu/news/2020/07/bowdoin-to-provide-ipad...

Many sectors are slashing their marketing budgets, especially their vaguely-targeted mass-marketing or big-incumbent-brand marketing.

But Facebook's ad engine allows micro-targeting, and is especially valuable to upstarts & small-businesses in times of changing behavior/consumer-loyalties.

To the extent big spenders free up inventory, Facebook has bidders-in-the-wings, offering just-a-little-less, and plenty of impressions among the 2.99 billion people who visit one of the Facebook family-of-sites monthly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com