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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

Meta always likes to play the victim card about the effect of Apple's anti-tracking measures but it's ended up being a win for them. Companies have been moving to server side conversion tracking and browser fingerprinting which actually improves the ad targeting. Also it's helped build a moat that is making life harder for smaller ad players to compete.

Also Threads has been a massive score for them. It's allowed Instagram to focus on Reels to compete with TikTok and fed in a ton of new behavioural attributes. Plus ad spend amongst large brands surely must have moved to Meta after leaving Twitter/X.

It's just amazing how things have turned around for Zuck during the last year.

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Meta has staged probably the biggest corporate comeback ever. $1 trillion of market value created in the past year alone. Threads is a success by targeting high-SES, high-educated demographic (sorta like Pinterest). The opposite of most social networks.

Elon won’t be happy…

It’s almost like it is good business to not openly antagonize half your potential users. Someone understands power law networks (and someone does not…).

It’s impressive but I don’t think it beats Apple, which was pretty close to dead at one point.

Apple's App Tracking Transparency policy has had a measurable impact on businesses that rely on ads for their sales.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4698374

Exactly. If before small business would have to pay Meta $.10 to get 100 targeted people in the door, that same company now has to pay $.30 to show that same ad to enough randos that those 100 interested people get on the door.

Meta was actually being sincere when they said it would hurt small business because otherwise it makes them TON of money. Everyone just fell into the cynicism trap and didn't believe Mark.

So Threads is basically the old insta for pictures now?

Instagram is half-images/half-video and Threads is half-images/half-text.

And yeah all of the popular photographers were on Threads from the beginning since photo carousel support was one of the first features that was implemented.

Nice explanation!

Insta is only half video since a year because they crammed in this reel nonsense to try and out-tiktok TikTok. And fail.

I don't want a "for you" feed and I don't want reels but they keep sticking them in my face. And everyone is now posting photos as video because the algorithm favours it.

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