This seems like a huge problem. Revenue looks ok, but shoving more ads into the products has to come back and bite them eventually right? I'm pretty bullish on META compared to most of this website, but if Mark keeps giving in to wall st. concerns there might be spiralling issues.
Source: I worked at yahoo! way back in the day and lived through exactly this.
Certain parts of a datalake are not for fishing in.
The question is what do you do when you don't get the answer you want? - when it shows that you are losing audience, though perhaps slowly. It is very difficult/impossible for a manager to say "let's miss this month's revenue goal for the long term benefit of slowing audience loss". And so instead you come with other reasons to explain the audience loss and/or justify keeping the ads. And so the audience loss continues. You are the boiling frog.
Granted, for most running businesses that's not enough to move the needle but I wonder how many other such levers meta has pulled now and how much it's gonna cost them down the line. When you are in super lean mode you might just not integrate it on day one now.
And then some of those just won't, ever.
Source: I work at Meta.
Imagine if they put 10% more ads in, and those ads made users reduce their usage of the apps by 10%... Overall impressions would be level.
But that isn't what they see - the impressions number increasing says they are successfully sneaking more ads in, without making many users go elsewhere.
I do wonder if they practice and prepare for that case - because the Digg social network failed so quickly (within about 96 hours), I expect they want to avoid the same fate.