Yikes. Good lesson learned for them there I hope.
The lesson learned is that these small “brands” that can only exist due to adware (fake demand) will eventually be culled by increases in prices or de-amplification of their products.
If your “brand” is one of these then you should be learning that you need to actually make a good product at a good price that doesn’t rely on advertising to succeed in your marketplace. Otherwise you are always at risk of being squeezed and potentially shut down.
Many (certainly not all) of these companies are parasites in that the rely on Meta to utilize algorithms to get you addicted and alter your purchasing habits. They don’t actually offer a good product at a good price, they offer copies of other products with different labels, or in some cases outright, disposable junk.
How do you create a product that doesn’t need advertising? People need to find out about it somehow.
Are you a local coffee shop or clothing designer? Why would you be advertising on Facebook when you should be partnering with a local news site or city/town interest site, or going to meetups, or sponsoring local events?
Relying on Facebook ads builds artificial demand, subjects you to extreme competition, and ultimately either you have to spend too much to maintain or you eventually lose customers because the only reason they were interested in your product was the ads in the first place. Live by the ad, die by the ad.
All of that is advertising.
I was replying to this:
> If your “brand” is one of these then you should be learning that you need to actually make a good product at a good price that doesn’t rely on advertising to succeed in your marketplace.
Maybe I misinterpreted the meaning.
It is just first-party advertising for App Store, News+ etc.
The sort of channels small businesses were never going to use anyway.
And stocks and weather. They also have a video platform they could expand into, and music oh don't forget books. Don't they also make a web browser?
Hmmm.... Yeah, i guess it's no big deal that it's only apple's first party apps.
Their execution under the guise of caring for user privacy is a master class though, it's impeccably done, there should be a case study done about this.
Apple is irrelevant and until one of those channels gets billions of users looking at it every day it will remain irrelevant.
People may hate apple but we're continuing down an advertising hellscape. I feel bad for the small business owners. But that's life.
They just shove vast amounts of data into towers of ML models and a prediction comes out. They use that prediction to rank ads.
In this scenario, how was your privacy violated?
This isn't a troll, I'm genuinely interested in your answer.