”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.
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.
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
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.
So it doesn’t seem contradictory that overall consumption stayed constant while the advertising arms race advanced significantly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.