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Comment by Ozzie_osman | Hacker News Reader

Our startup spends a little bit on Facebook Ads (across FB, Instagram, etc). It's very clear over the past few months that there's trouble in the ads engine. Attribution is a mess, ad efficiency fluctuates randomly, the UI and API are flaky. I don't know whether this is a result of the ios privacy changes, the broader economy affecting ad spend, or internal issues... Maybe a mix. But it's clear that Meta's main revenue engine is a complete mess at the moment.

PS it's not just us. We've seen industry-wide data showing that it's a broader issue.

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iOS privacy has killed facebook advertisements. Meta is dealing with it currently - so are all small businesses who relied on good conversion from their ad targeting that has gone to isht since then.

Apple will probably fill in that void at some point they've got a lock on all that intelligence. I'm curious how long it will take and how they will manage to do it without stepping on privacy toes.

> iOS privacy has killed facebook advertisements

A problem I see with FB is that they don't control anything on which they run. They run on stuff from their competitors: it's either Google (Chrome / Android), Microsot (Windows / Edge) or Apple (OS X / Safari / iOS).

Despite the downturn these three behemoths are still enjoying a market cap in the trillion+. Meta is actually down to $360 bn. Meta controls neither the OS nor the browser.

They want to change that by having people switching en masse to the Metaverse but I'm really not sure this is happening.

You know, I've been wondering what could possibly possess Meta to be so, "FUCK YEAH, ALL IN MF'ERS!!!" about the metaverse for a while now. This actually makes a lot of sense; companies control the platforms we are on, which then determines how we must operate (read: which prevents us from invasively monitoring you as much as we'd like), so why not control the full stack as people close more doors on us?

I still think they are going to fail spectacularly there, but I suppose I can't blame them for trying.

Perhaps they shouldn't have bailed on making phones. Android phone arena is still very messy and they could just...have good hardware and a slick skin on Android and probably make a go of it.

I know I'm armchairing the devil so to speak but I think this would have been a good long term play for them, but I imagine their expertise at the time was antithetical to hardware.

Meta/Microsoft/Amazon all did not want to plow the billions of dollars and years it takes to develop hardware that can compete with iPhone and Android.

They bet that they did not need to, but unfortunately for Meta, looks like they should have.

Not even compete with Android, just build a better Android phone, and sell it near cost (or at cost). Would have given them troves of data I'm sure.

The muscle is around contract negotiation with the carriers and co-opting those partnerships, but they had the money to burn on this.

Who in their right mind would buy a Facebook phone, considering the neverending security issues, data leaks and total disregard for user privacy?

7-10 years ago it would have sold. Especially if they marketed is as "use FB as your address book".

I would've loved a basic FB integrated tablet for my parents. Something that had easy video chat for the kids. This would have worked really well with the friend graph. My options both on Android and iOS leave a lot to be desired.

The Meta Portal is exactly what you want. The hardware is actually pretty nice.

I mean people buy google phones, it can't get a lot worse than them. And they aren't bad phones either.

Imo at the end of the day people don't give two shits about privacy, convenience is king

The same people that still use Facebook. Which is to say, we could probably find a couple of billion people who couldn't give two rats asses about all that, and just want to respond to Aunt Nancy's political rants[1] in a space where everyone can see.

[1] Or watch Feel Good Videos ABOUT People Spontaneously HELPING Poor ANIMALS Trapped In A PREDICAMENT [2].

[2] That the people in question may or may not have put them into.

I genuinely despise the people that make [1][2] for monetisation purposes and ad dumping. Intentionally torturing and starving small animals for likes. Fuck.

It would tell if it was like one plus. Premium phone at a discount. One plus has horrendous privacy issues

They all DID plow billions of dollars into phone efforts, but they just couldn't muscle their way into a competitive position

They could all definitely manufacture Android devices and hold some Android sub-market share, but that business isn't interesting to them. They wanted to control a platform, and when it was clear that wasn't going to happen (after spending many billions), they gave up.

Clearly they needed to plow more billions and years. They are competing with company that has spent a decade+ developing a retail store presence as well as iterating over and over on their product.

But Microsoft and Google and Meta were not interested in “in person support” or business that does not scale, and part of the price they pay for that is to be gimped by Apple at a moments notice and watch your market cap dive.

I think Google showed with Windows Phone that they were very much willing to sacrifice a few users of their huge platforms in order to sabotage any competitor platforms entirely (e.g. refusing them access to the YouTube API, and refusing to develop a YT app for WP). I think that once Amazon and MS stopped developping their phone OSs, the message was well and truly sent: you either make a Google phone, or you try to make a popular phone without easy access to YouTube and GMail and Google Maps (obviously, Apple was already too big by the time Android really got going for Google to have any chance of hurting Apple more than themselves with this same strategy).

I have a Quest 2 and It's sitting inside a box behind the PC inside a Nike shoebox and when I try to use it, I need to basically go through a whole process all over again. A factory reset as it were because something to do with facebook account wasn't needed... but then it was needed so i made a fake account... something to do with I don't need facebook anymore... something to do with a meta account.... something to do with I needed to switch on dev mode to stop it annoying me about guardian when I want to use it on the sofa... something to do with installing some kind of app on my phone to sync to it to make it work... something about my occulus dev account is invalid... something about....

I can't use the device.

If I dig into the box, and drag it out, I need to deal with all of this stuff. I want to play for example Superhot, but I have no idea how to even reinstall or even if I need to reinstall because I need to login with something above "all over again".

Fucking trash.

The "Metaverse" is just a bad joke regardless if it worked perfectly, but all of this crud means that I can't even be bothered picking up the actual device.

> They want to change that by having people switching en masse to the Metaverse but I'm really not sure this is happening.

The tech isn't even close to there yet.

Current gen VR tech demos sparks the imagination, and it's definitely great for people that want to like it... But that's not even close to good enough for mass adoption.

Their teased prototypes look like a solid upgrade, but it's still not going to be enough.

Mobile procedures just don't have enough graphics power yet and the one's we do have consume too much power. We're missing several hardware breakthrough before mass adoption becomes likely from my perspective as a VR headset owner.

It's probably gonna happen eventually, but not necessarily with current tech.

Meta might succeed if it stays on the ball and keeps pushing for centuries, but i don't think it's management will do so.

> centuries

Centuries? I haven't taken a close look at VR (though I'm flirting with buying a headset soon, just for kicks...) but I'd always assumed it was more like 10-25 years away.

What are the hardware breakthroughs that you think would do it?

Brain implants. Or very light AR glasses.

Are you going to be willing to install a brain implant from Facebook? Dear God. It's like something out of a dystopian movie. No amount of money will convince me to do something like this, especially coming from Facebook, but any corporation really.

Very light AR glasses can be an interesting proposition but they will not provide the VR immersive experience.

I'm not sure what people expect from VR but it's not Ready Player One and will not be for a very long time. However, playing Half Life Alyx is quite phenomenal even today on current hardware.

I would bet money that Meta is going to fail spectacularly at their attempt to build the metaverse.

And it will be fun to watch from the outside.

Unfortunately, I don't expect this endeavor to give interesting fruits to humanity, but sometimes happy accidents happen.

Only thing I can think is that GP is making a sports reference (1 century = 100 runs in cricket) a la "home run" being used to mean a smashing success.

True lightfield display would be a start....

Which reminds me, whatever happened to magic leap?

They burned through an ungodly amount of money. There was a headset that they released four years ago - it was a flop. Similar deal to the hololens, first generaion aimed at developers. Recently they've pivoted and there is a second generation headset announced that is aimed at business users.

Flailing about? And of course what they were doing was NOT true light field display.

I walked in oculus for like 10 minutes, and I puked. The technology isn't ready.

Lots of people get car sick but nobody would say that the car isn't ready yet.

First of all, no one gets car sick while driving - already a major difference to VR. Secondly, most people who can get car sick can avoid it by sitting in the front row and looking only straight ahead.

Finally, even for people who get hopelessly car sick as passengers no matter what they do, the advantage of a fast safe private ride often outweighs the discomfort - especially since no one is spending more than 1h in a car more often than a few times a year. It is very hard to imagine what application could make VR give even close to the amount of utility that cars give you.

I'd bet those people only use cars when needed. Nobody will go cruising on a puke machine.

And we never need Oculus for anything. That's a big difference.

*for you.

for most people, I'd posit.

Very few people need oculus/VR, while a lot people need cars. Possibly a lot more like 10000x

honestly i want to know, what need is there for it? Why should i wear something on my head? what advantage does it have on computers/ handheld devices? what can i do on a VR headset that I can't already do on a computer or handheld device?

Sounds like a difference in kind.

This reminds me of what Apple did just before Web came to the fore. They had something called HyperCard. Then they had something called "Agents" for automating your online activities. But neither of those platforms succeeded.

The biggest question isn't even whether its technology is ready. The biggest question is WHY?

Why as a consumer, do I want to wear something on my head? especially since, handheld phones are already way more engaging than I need. Are VR headsets just another entertainment device (something I have way too much of already) or will it facilitate work from home?

But Facebook is a platform unto itself. If it was still an enjoyable product that everyone used, and connected to their local interests and groups on, they could still have great, targeted advertising I think. But people don't really seem to use it much anymore in earnest, and their targeting probably relied more on 3rd party scripts across the Internet which are being restricted.

I'm still in the habit of clicking that Facebook bookmark occasionally, and have a few extend circle contacts who regularly post. But nine out of ten times the page does not even update anything beyond the server-side populated parts above the fold. Those "story" or what they are called snapchat(?) clones? They work even less frequently. Sometimes they do, so I assume that it can't really be a systematic failure on my side like some weird browser configuration issue. Apparently Facebook, the website, is crumbling on the inside (technology) as much as on the outside (audience).

> Apparently Facebook, the website, is crumbling on the inside (technology)

This is what makes me really uneasy about React. I feel there is too much cargo cult of a technology that doesn’t even work for their creators in the first place.

> A problem I see with FB is that they don't control anything on which they run. They run on stuff from their competitors: it's either Google (Chrome / Android), Microsot (Windows / Edge) or Apple (OS X / Safari / iOS).

You do realize you just described the vast majority of all tech companies that exist today, right?

Yeah, and fb is bigger than them. The question is more about what it takes to be a trillion dollar co.

So what? Where's the cutoff? Tell me one tech company besides Apple, Google, and Microsoft that logic wouldn't apply to. (No, Tesla doesn't count.)

The only other tech giant that is a trillion dollar company is Amazon, and they own a lot of platforms. Beyond those 4 there are no other trillion dollar tech cos. The cutoff is pretty clear and the field is small.

Meta buys firefox.. metafox!

The high price of Apple products in markets like India was such a great targeting filter for D2C products by itself. There was a time in 2020-21 when you could literally throw any random ad for a premium product, choose iPhone users as your target, and land wild conversions.

> Apple will probably fill in that void at some point

a) what if they don't? Why should they?

b) I would lose a lot of trust in Apple if they did. I don't buy iOS devices because I trust Apple Ads better. I buy them because I can avoid ads better and my privacy doesn't get shredded in the process.

c) Wouldn't that be a massive antitrust issue?

Apple already is filling that void. If you run your ads on third-party networks, you are beholden to Apple's privacy rules. But if you run Apple Search Ads through, Apple itself, a lot of the same rules don't apply and you get targeting and attribution back.

A lot of advertisers are thus shifting their ad spend into Apple.

But this is just in the App Store, right? Not on web or within iOS spotlight.

Honestly I don't use FB, but my wife does, and I can tell you she spends about 1/100th the time in the Apple App Store as FB.

I don't see Search Ads as having anywhere near the same context.

Yes, their inventory is smaller at the moment, but they also show ads in News and Stock apps (note that those ads are personalized and don't have an ATT prompt by default.. so Apple apps don't have to play by the same rules as others). My guess is they will continue to expand inventory to other Apple apps (eg Maps, etc), but whether they try to build a full-fledged ad platform (where you can use Apple to buy ads in 3rd party apps) is yet to be seen.. they'd definitely have to overcome a backlash if they did that.

Where do you get ads in the Stocks app? At least I don't. Though the yahoo finance news stuff is rather useless.

> what if they don't? Why should they?

They will because they are a for-profit company and there's profit to be had. Apple will likely find a strong marketing angle for their Ad network (won't be the first time they've tried).

Selling hardware is a great business but it gets saturated eventually. The next move for eternal growth is selling services on top of said hardware.

> I would lose a lot of trust in Apple if they did. I don't buy iOS devices because I trust Apple Ads better. I buy them because I can avoid ads better and my privacy doesn't get shredded in the process.

Apple already has a lot of data about you. Consider that they own both the hardware and software experience on an iPhone. I'm having a hard time seeing an alternative here unless you have the time to manage your own phone OS...

> Wouldn't that be a massive antitrust issue?

Only if someone does something about it. I assume G and Meta's lawyers are already working on arguments.

It defies description why they aren't bringing context-sensitive ads back. They didn't follow you all around the Internet, they were relevant in any given context, and you felt less need to block them out mentally.

I was more likely to click on context-sensitive ads. Most targeted ads I see these days are for products that I've already bought in the past few weeks, which just boggles my mind.

Edit: Even today, I'm still seeing ads for a subwoofer that I bought back in early August. Good going, Meta.

I bet that showing ads based on context is somehow limited to people being in that context (i.e. in a specific website for instance), while being able to draw an audience from the entirety of Facebook users (in the billions) is more profitable.

If Apple doesn't, it seems a bit insane to miss the opportunity.

Note that I strongly dislike adtech as a business model, but my hat is off to their cunning marketing if Apple pulls it off.

As much as I can’t stand any company involved here, if apple does what you suggest it would be far more offensive than any other supposed antitrust violations alleged over the last few years.

They have an advertising platform already, right?

Apple has been around for a while, they I wonder if the company has some institutional 'survival instinct' that's identified growing the ad platform become too much as long-term unhealthy. It is a corrupting influence that makes the consumer into the enemy, after all.

They've also managed to become incredibly huge while somehow mostly dodging the eye of regulatory bodies. Privacy could mess with that track record and I'm sure they are aware of that fact.

Our CPIs have been absurd ever since the privacy changes. Meta is fucked and I don’t think people realize how much of an effect this is going to have on the entire internet.

There are large downstream effects the iOS privacy changes are having on mobile advertising and the viability of companies that rely on mobile programmatic to bring people in the door.

Somehow businesses marketed effectively before individualized ad tracking. I don’t think the world is going to end.

Some kinds of businesses did. But the current version of a tech startup didn't. No, the world won't end, but we could be looking at significant economic changes.

Less business were able to. Personalized ads makes it so that more businesses are viable.

Apple is a private company, they decided to limit the current mechanism through which adtech tracked people, and if people dislike it they can switch to more advertising-friendly devices. What I like about the current situation is everything is done freely - no law was passed to make Apple do it, nor make Meta use it.

As consumers start understanding exactly how adtech works - and such education took decades - they are freely choosing devices that limit tracking, and when given the option to opt-out, are opting out at extremely high numbers. This tells you something about what consumers want.

Businesses would be more viable if they learned to market through mechanisms that were less distasteful to consumers.

>As consumers start understanding exactly how adtech works

I can assure you that consumers do not. Even someone in this comment section of a technical form didn't know what attribution is which is an important part of how adtech works. Even from an extremely high level the prevalence of the phrase "XYZ is selling your data" despite that not happening is a clear sign that most people just parrot what they hear than actually understand. There has been a large amount of scaremongering about how bad this tracking is to people. This scaremongering drives more people to opt out than people opting out who actually understand how it works.

>Businesses would be more viable if they learned to market through mechanisms that were less distasteful to consumers.

That is not true. If the cost of that alternative marketing costs more than what you will make from doing it then the business is not viable.

> they can switch to more advertising-friendly devices

What are they? Android is copying Apple[0]. Desktop?

[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/16/google-plans-android-privacy...

It's a free market, someone can create a pro-advertising phone if they think it will be successful. Plenty of Android phones are chock full of terrible adware.

It's tough for businesses that thrived on the privacy-compromising features of early 21st century adtech. They can adapt or die.

its not though. Android and Google have moats b/c the control the users.

I think this is missing a lot of nuances of digital advertising and the environment that business now operate in. The two major types of ads that used to exist were local and brand. Local is pointless for vast majority of today's digital businesses. Brand is very expensive from both a production and spend perspective, it is only suitable for already large businesses, there is also a lot of research that suggest it is very ineffective in actually generating sales for B2C.

Third option was to take out ads in a specialist publication to reach an audience that would mostly be aligned with your product (ie. business that makes chess boards taking out an ad in a chess magazine). This is probably the closest equivalent of targeted advertising today.

The barrier to entry for retail has dropped ridiculously with Shopify, allowing for niche and specialised retailers in a way that was previously not feasible. Acquiring new customers is still the hardest thing for a business to do, always has been and always will be, without the ability to reach new customers and connect with the audience who is interested in the businesses niche that is all dead in the water.

Take a look at the top 20 advertisers, by total amount spent. You'll see, it's almost entirely large companies that don't calculate any kind of ROI and thus are extremely insensitive to CPIs. Companies like Pepsi and Nike don't and can't calculate ROI, they just want to spend a certain number of billion dollars on ads, even if it's just to prevent competitors from having those ad slots.

Now businesses, that do depend on a positive ROI on ad spend, in order to compete and survive: they are F*ked, sadly.

They've gotten so damn greedy.

On the mobile app literally over half my feed is ads.

I don’t know if there’s any merit to this idea, but it seems to me that saturation can become a real problem.

At this point skipping a story or feed ad in Instagram is like a nearly instant reflex for me.

Plus, the programming on the recommendations is laughably amateur for company as resourceful as Meta. If I interact with an ad one time I’ll see the same ad over and over for days or weeks.

Sure, I was curious for a second, but it seems strange that Meta can’t tell that I’m not interested anymore just by monitoring basic usage of the UI.

At the end of the day the advertiser is the one left paying for these repeated ineffective ad impressions.

Somewhat related, I am a little surprised Meta hasn’t tried a Discord-like revenue model where paid annual memberships bestow quality of life and cosmetic social status types of benefits. Even if it wasn’t their main source of revenue it could at least diversify the business and lend some stability to their revenue.

Facebook’s revenue per user is less than $10. Discord charges $99/year for Nitro. I feel like Meta has such a one-track mindset on advertising that it doesn’t consider different revenue models for its businesses.

Meta spends a lot of time talking about the metaverse but Discord is already the metaverse. Why isn’t there a subscription Meta Quest game pass with Discord-like social features? It’s a no-brainer.

Where’s the “pro” paid version of Instagram? Why doesn’t Instagram sell subscription access to things like exclusive camera filters, stickers, and editing tools?

I feel like the company is full of missed business opportunities.

>At the end of the day the advertiser is the one left paying for these repeated ineffective ad impressions.

If advertisers had a better option, Meta will have gone out of business by next week.

Actually, that's a real thing advertisers DO want.

It's called retargeting.

> that's a real thing advertisers DO want

I think GP is talking about a more specific thing, and it's one I experience all the time too: that I'll visit a website briefly one time, by accident, or to satisfy some curiosity, or look up the specifications on something I already own, or to get a link to send to a friend, or whatever other non-purchase reason, and then get shown ads for their thing over and over and over again until the end of time despite the fact that there's a 0% chance that I will ever buy it.

I'm sure it's true that, in the general case, advertisers want to show ads to customers multiple times, but in these particular cases, they shouldn't want to show them to me -- I'm definitely not going to buy the thing, and they're wasting their money, and it seems like Facebook ought to be able to better differentiate between users like me who will definitely not convert and users who might (like GP said: seems like there ought to be detectable patterns in the way I do or don't engage with the content that should signal my lack of interest).

Exactly what I’m saying. I clicked or expanded something out of momentary curiosity. Maybe the ad was provocative or mysterious and I wanted to see what the deal was.

Step two, I get retargeted. That’s fine and expected.

Step three, I get retargeted. Again. And again…and again.

What I don’t understand is how Meta/Instagram can’t figure out at least a little bit sooner that I was clearly just satisfying my curiosity and now every time I see the same ad I scroll by extra fast or otherwise interact in ways that should indicate disinterest.

People complain about this all the time.

It is annoying, but it's not illogical.

If you have looked at something once, say there's a 99% chance that you have no further interest in it. But the 1% chance that you are potentially going to buy it after being shown the ad again is still much better odds than showing it to a random person, or a random person who is somehow correlated to the target market.

Even after seeing the ad 50 more times and ignoring it, you are probably still a statistically better lead than someone who has never interacted with the ad. They're not making a strong assumption about you, even though it seems that way. They're making a very weak assumption based on the small number of people who clicked once, hesitated, saw the ad 49 times more, carried on hesitating, and now are finally ready to buy.

It definitely isn't some big problem that bothers me at all.

I do wonder if advertisers can turn that behavior off and/or limit the number of times their product is shown to the same person.

I also wonder if Meta has some kind of model that's predicting post-impression interest.

My feed is mostly not posts from people I know (for some reason it has started sending me tiktok length clips of standup comedians). Actually it is not so bad, some of the clips are pretty funny, but I could get that sort of content from tiktok or youtube I guess, I just happen to use the facebook app because it is already installed.

Their fundamental advantage was network effect, I guess that is dead now that like 1/5 posts I see is from a friend.

People have stopped posting on facebook. That's the reason for increasing content from other sources.

I suspect the reason why people have stopped posting is because of increasing content from other sources. It's definitely my reason.

It's a negative feedback loop.

Yep, one of the main reasons I stopped using FB many many years ago was that they made it so hard to view the posts I actually cared about, and gave the user almost no control. It was clear at least a decade ago that FB didn't care about users and just saw them as chattel to squeeze for money.

My understanding is that this is the strategy: the network effect method for choosing what content you want (FB/Insta) is getting beat by the "algorithm determines what you are interested in" method for choosing what content you want, so Facebook is pivoting to the latter.

Maybe Myspace should make a concerted push back into the space Facebook has I guess decided to vacate.

It seems crazy to try and compete with Tiktok on their home turf, they sound to have a pretty competent implementation and Facebook has got to be about as nimble as a barge at this point.

I use it on the browser to check one or two groups and on my phone for events, it's a mess. On the groups I always want to check for the most recent posts because it doesn't have a lot of activity and besides countless things I've tried it always wants to show the posts ordered with its algorithm. It's also like:

post AD post AD post AD

I'm used to ads, I grew up watching cartoons and shows on prime time old airwaves TV and listening to music on Top 50 radio shows. This is worse. No other media is as bad as Facebook ad-wise and no other media is worse than what prime TV and radio where in the 90s. They devolved.

49% ads, 49% content, 2% "news feed isn't available right now" if I scroll too far (a couple dozen screens). Been like this for ages.

Meanwhile I constantly get ads for restaurants and other businesses almost everywhere but the state I live in (California).

I routinely get ads for Boston, NY, Japan, Taiwan, Germany.

I've been to NY and Japan but none of the other places. So I don't think it's using my previous locations.

It's really hard to configure FB to target actual locations as opposed to people interested in those locations.

You've been to NY, so you're interested in NY, so FB will make money fleecing restaurants in NY wasting their ad money on you.

If you work somewhere like Facebook, this is totally unsurprising. There are probably thousands of engineers writing yet-another-framework and working on the 100th re-invention of the wheel for some random internal product that users will never see. The engineers actually solving business problems are almost always understaffed and under-appreciated, hence why the product sucks.

Is over half your feed is labeled "Sponsored", or are you looking at other things as ads?

Do you think the Digital Markets Act in the E.U. had anything to do with this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/technology/eu-regulation-...

This hasn't gone into effect yet. When it does, it could expand Meta's ability to track users. If Apple is tracking users for ads, then they must extend that ability to third parties like Meta.

What does it mean when attribution is a mess? Or efficiency fluctuating?

Does this imply that Facebook is showing ads in places they should not be, because they have inventory they cannot sell?

> What does it mean when attribution is a mess?

Attribution means being able to "attribute" a user and the conversions (eg signups, purchases, etc) they do back to your ad spend. So typically, advertisers want to be able to know that e.g. this ad campaign spent $100, led to 5 clicks, which led to 2 sign-ups and 1 purchase. Before the iOS privacy changes, Facebook could piece all those things together even though the ad might be running either on Facebook or another app, and the conversions are happening in your ad. Aka they could "attribute" the events back to the ad. With the new changes, Facebook can't put all those pieces together as easily, so they can either only do it on an aggregated basis (ie not user-by-user), and/or use probabilistic "modeling" to do attribution. This is good for users, since they are less likely to be tracked, but bad for advertisers who now cannot easily know how effective their ad spend is.

> ... efficiency fluctuating

Let's say one day you spend $1000 and get 100 purchases, that's $10 / purchase. A purchase nets $15 for you, so that is good ad spend. The next day, you spend $1000 and only get 50 purchases, so it's $20 / purchase and you are losing money on your ad spend. These numbers fluctuate a lot more wildly than they did in the past, and it seems to happen randomly, making it hard to commit to spending a certain budget.

This is probably related to attribution, because Facebook uses a lot of Machine Learning to predict who to show an ad to, where to show it, etc based on past conversions. But if they can't really attribute past conversions, it's hard for their Machine Learning model to consistently get results.

Hard to confirm that your ads are converting, and wild daily/weekly fluctuations in return on ad spend.

As a user, FB is a hot mess rn so much so that I'm forced to switch to other apps. 8/10 posts are either sponsored or "suggested" by some random page. It's like watching 30 mins of ad to watch 1 min of video on youtube. When I instictively open the app, the first 10 posts (ads) help me in breaking the habit.

To me it looks like they tried to copy TikTok, with loads of ads and turned a decent product into something no one wants to use.

They still dominate the Indian market simply because TikTok is banned here.

While I don’t undermine the spying potential of TikTok, the ban was strangely timed - soon after a huge investment from Facebook in India’s biggest company (and one with tremendous lobbying power). Only a handful of Chinese apps were banned, even though majority of devices running them were Chinese as well (and went unbanned).

Facebook very well would have lost the massive Indian market as well without the TikTok ban.

I haven't done much with Facebook ads since 2019, but back then the UI was a flaky, buggy mess. It was pretty terrible to work with. At one point they had a "Power Editor" and then a simpler ads interface. They combined these into one unified tool and it was pretty rough.

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