It's been truly shit to own Facebook stock the last year.. Let's end this now and get back to writing the growth story. Please.
The money advertisers can pay Facebook is, essentially, a percentage of all consumer spending. A percentage of the money you pay for toilet paper, dish soap, groceries, car insurance, credit cards, etc is funding the advertising budgets of those companies.
The money consumers can pay Facebook is, at most, some portion of their discretionary spending budget. What's left over after buying all that stuff, and paying the rest of their bills (housing, fuel, taxes, etc).
The first number is a much bigger number than the second.
If Facebook is no longer able to capture Charmin's ad spend because they can no longer provide adequate targeting, then Facebook will no longer get that money. The Charmin customers don't have it to send to Facebook directly, they gave it to Charmin to buy their toilet paper.
If nobody is allowed to build a demographic profile for cross-site cookies, the biggest negative impact will be to small sites. Previously their ad inventory could be relatively high value because it could be assigned targeted ads at scale, without site-specific work or having to trust the site itself. Now the site will at best self-report their user demographics. (1) they probably have poor visibility into their customer demo without something like Google Analytics to guide them and (2) it's difficult for a third party to verify any demographic composition they claim.
Ad targeting on these will likely be content based. I suspect this inventory mostly won't be eligible for lucrative display advertising anymore, if it was before.
And the reason they do it so well is because they are so invasive to peoples integrity that if people find out - they’d also quit the service in droves, and it’s also so invasive that regulators are objecting.
I don’t see Facebook returning to growth any time soon.
Excuse me, 'growth story'? For Facebook ??
Time proves the shareholders vs. rest of society stereotype to be true, I guess
[1] unless the data is needed for the website to work
What the hell are you talking about? You can keep providing ads. If it's a paid service, you can keep providing a paid service. No one is asking you to do stuff for free.
They can show ads on the service. They can even ask people to opt in to targeted advertising.
What they can't do is harvest people's personal data to monetize the service.
In other words: You can give away potatoes for free. You can sell potatoes for money. You can sell potatoes for onions. You can, in many countries, even sell potatoes for sexual favors, although there will be some rules to protect against exploitation. What you cannot do, in most countries, is sell potatoes for kidneys, and you most definitely can't sell potatoes while surreptitiously removing customer's kidneys and hoping they don't notice or care enough because they have two and you're only taking one.
It think it's a gray area right now though.
Others give you the choice between targeted advertising and paying for non-targeted advertising, or three choices (free with targeted ads, paid with non-targeted ads, paid a lot with no ads).
Note how the Google and Instagram consent dialogs changed in the past year or so. I'm sure that wasn't voluntary...
This is currently being contested by NOYB.
The most profound mistake is their lack of proper risk assessment, as well as proof and transparent documentation of real actual significant harm done to users, to warrant such discriminating privacy laws. In the process they are hurting everyone, including small personal blogs, news media sites, and large social media sites.
The data, if hacked, or spied on by employees, is still a privacy risk regardless if its used for targeting ads or not. The data still sits on the servers, because the applications depend on it to function properly. The number of ecommerce websites alone that do not properly handle personal data is scary; basically anyone with database access can also access all the personal data on customers. If a given CMS has a known exploit, then the data is in great risk of being leaked and abused. E.g. Never host a site on Wordpress without proper security in place.
Nevertheless. We should always maintain that the user is ultimately responsible. If they do not like Facebook, they just ought NOT to create a Facebook account. Dislike being watched when walking around in physical shops? Stay away from them. However, the actual risk to the individual user, from ads, is so miniscule that we practically have no substantive examples of harm done. The worst shit is falsehoods promoted via ads, but that is purely an policy/moderation problem. Fake pages and accounts are a much bigger problem than falsehoods promoted via ads.
Having a paid subscription model would be a valid opt-out of advertising (ads are often dishonest, so I would like to see that). The problem is, the data still sits on servers, and if leaked, this will, unlike targeted ads, pose an actual real risk of harm.
I am not against the GDPR or the EU, but it has been profoundly flawed from the beginning, costing website owners a lot of time and money trying to comply. I absolutely hate consent platforms, because they are just another third party dependency IMO...