As someone who's worked on a few ad supported apps, I have to admit that I share Zuck's sentiment. How do we make money if few are willing to pay for apps and ads don't pay enough?
If your mobile apps don't make money without invasive ad targeting, that's OK: others clearly can (see the sibling commenter), and we can get by with fewer mobile apps that don't when they are are presenting so thin a value proposition as to be unable to get users to pay for them through conventional means.
The "hard men / strong times" line in your profile (which, to be candid, is a pretty gross pretext for a lot of bad-actor politics, but you picked it not me) echoes deep here: there are plenty of endeavors that sell something people want enough to pay actual money for them, and you can always do that instead. I haven't worked for an ad-supported tech business since my first job out of college in 2010, and most of their business was actually in air travel and hotel bookings, the ads were tertiary. The jobs and the products exist.
Let's unleash the hot take cannon for a second: users basically don't need apps. Businesses do--and there's a ton of money in LOB mobile apps even--but almost every B2C mobile application I can think of is some form of luxury good. Making the case for a luxury good is harder than making one for one of self-evident value. Congratulations--you picked hard mode, and nobody is obligated to make it easier.
Optimize for making value to people who will pay for it, not virality or shareability, and perhaps you have a path to not needing to play with edgy patterns.
What value, in a sane system, does selling advertising that targets people who "can't even afford decent housing or food" actually do? How are the goods you are selling--human attention--actually turning into revenue for the advertiser if the user has no money to act on the advertising? Or is it just one more iteration on a mutual deception that exists to create a predicate for "any of these mobile apps are worth creating in the first place"?
You're building a bigger house of cards with every post.
In fact, the more desperate, the more willing they’d be to click on an ad, which gives a perverse incentive to advertisers and developers to worsen their financial position.
But please, show me examples of these good targeted ads because while in theory they could exist, something tells me they very much don’t.
Not true, you don't speak for what I know.
> show me examples of these good targeted ads because while in theory they could exist, something tells me they very much don’t.
The non-profits in my area (which is very low income) would very much like to target my local community better/cheaper.
Just because you refuse to say it publicly does not mean you don't know it.
> The non-profits in my area (which is very low income) would very much like to target my local community better/cheaper.
They certainly would, but have they? I asked for a very simple and specific thing. Examples of targeted ads right now that are specifically targeted towards low-income folks and which are doing it to better their lives.
Please, by all means, show me examples. Not anecdotes. Not opinion. Hard examples.
Until then, it's a pipe dream used to justify your company's desire to further invade people's privacy.
Does that honestly sound fair to you? I'm not putting words into your mouth. Please respect my agency and I'll continue to respect yours in kind.
> Please, by all means, show me examples. Not anecdotes. Not opinion. Hard examples.
Aren't examples also anecdotes? https://www.sheerid.com/business/blog/why-and-how-you-should... > Take for example, Headspace, makers of the popular meditation app by the same name. The company created an exclusive discount to help teachers who might not be able to afford the app use it to manage their stress.
That’s a long way down from those theoretical local non-profits.
And if that’s the best you’ve got, then I don’t know how anyone could say anything but fuck no to invading their privacy for a shiny discount to an app they likely don’t even need.
In the single example you did provide, the motivation behind the targeting is still strictly to extract money from people. It may be to extract slightly less money from a specific group, but it's not like Headspace is doing the targeting out of the goodness of their hearts; they are doing it because they think they will get more profits from the higher number of sales even at a discount.
Using the most capitalistic example is certainly a choice you can make, but it's not one that is going to convince most people of your cause. If you want to convince people that targeted ads can be used for good, then actually show that it can be used for good instead of talking about theoretical and hypothetical non-profits and providing the weakest possible example when pushed for reality.
https://www.constantcontact.com/blog/facebook-ads-for-nonpro...
Non-profits and for profit companies alike can use targeted ads to mutually benefit those they are targeting. Obviously for profit companies exist to make money. Do you think that true altruism is a real thing? Everybody has a motive and that's the game we call life.
As far as my real-life local non-profit example: my local PP chapter reached out to my local side business IG account to share posts of their social media to widen their audience. Wouldn't it be great if they could better target people in their target demographic more easily / affordably?
So I am sorry that you and your innocent nonprofits are being impacted by the massive, exploitative, evil machine that inherently builds around grinding away privacy, but it’s an unfortunate side effect of how many ethicless assholes there are.
Come on. This is just sad.
This is just an example/anecdote.
The market doesn’t value journalism. I’m not saying that it isn’t important. But the market has spoken.
This, not simply "doesn't have money", is the thing about mobile apps that it feels like most people in that most things a user wants to do on a phone don't actually need an app, and if they do it's probably because they're buying something or talking to somebody and neither of those are categories that need more entries with a lower security barrier.
The median iPhone user in the US is making $53K a year (https://www.marketingdive.com/news/survey-iphone-owners-spen...).
And most people in the US are neither starving or homeless.
A typical developer is spending much less on a phone as a % of their income, whereas a typical iPhone buyer is spending much much more — to a surprising degree.
I certainly wouldn't, but a lot of iPhone users are. I'm not judging, I'm genuinely surprised.
Expenses don’t scale linearly with income.
When I was making $22K a year in 1996, I bought phone for $300, was that too much to spend on a cell phone too?
To a first approximation, no one buys their phone outright in the US and 62% of people replace their phone every 3-4 years (https://www.nevis.net/en/blog/how-often-do-users-change-thei...). So they are only spending .45% of their income on a phone.
Apple released a security update for the iPhone 5s released in 2013 earlier this year. There is no reason to replace your phone every year.
Again, it's just surprising and not a value judgement.
How many of those devices have been coalesced into one £1200 iPhone. I call that a result.
I don't recall exactly what I spent for my iPhone, but it was 4 years ago, so if we assume it was about $1000, then based on that median income, that makes it 0.5%. Does that seem more palatable to you...?
“Sensor Tower data reveals that U.S. iPhone users spent an average of $138 on apps in 2020, up 38% from 2019.”
[1] https://racketmn.com/rackets-year-in-review-august-2022-july...
Another approach could be to break up the big tech companies into a bunch of tiny pieces, and hope something more ethical comes out of the more distributed market power & natural competition.
...and keep a watchful eye and a litigious gun pointed at them lest they reconstitute.
Journalism is evolving and changing, but it isn't dying or going away. Hyper-targeted ads will not "save journalism".
News sites have to spend X% of their margin to continuously generate content to attract viewers, while big tech companies spend 0 to attract viewers because viewers are the generators of their content. For this fundamental reason, news sites never be able to compete on targeting granularity or ad pricing.
Rather than fighting a losing battle, it's better to put your chips behind a battle where you have a differentiated advantage (in the NYT/Cable News companies, it's the cornered resource of accredited voices in reporting and editorial).
It would be net-negative to try to compete in the space targeted ads. They'd be better off offering low-revenue, low-cost blanket ads (i.e. advertise in the "automotive" section of the website to non-subscribers), where the cost to the ad operator is effectively zero because they don't have to maintain a database of user ad profiles.
App Store developers generated $1.1 trillion in total billings and sales in the App Store ecosystem in 2022.
Small developers on the App Store grew revenue by 71 percent over the past two years.
People are absolutely willing to pay for apps and in-app purchases.
That does not track with my experience at all. Ad prevalence has only increased over time.
after all, it increased before any attempts to rein in targeted advertising (which still exists, it's just harder to hyper-target in some circumstances)
I was already starting to think you're full of it from your responses to other posters, but now I'm sure of it.
We don’t want to pack our experience with ads, but we literally need to post IDFA nerfing.
That's hardly unique to this site, and hardly as recent as 2016.
I would say that we can trace people with an understanding of technology being anti-ad back to at least 1989: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters?useskin=vector