Twitter CFO Anthony Noto Privately Analyzes Facebook
dcurt.is
dcurt.is
I can answer this -> people don't realize ads on mobile are actually ads. FB's recent change of reducing FB Pages exposure on the News Feed affects this big time. For example, if I like Nike and I receive an ad for new shoes, I probably (1) didn't remember I actually "liked" Nike and/or (2) think this is just Nike updating a post on their Page. Regardless, because I like Nike, I don't care since the ad is relevant. FB actually does a fantastic job of providing relevant ads that most people would assume are simply their favorite brands giving them an update. Furthermore, when it comes to conversions for mobile apps install from FB ads, the friction is so low (click "Install Now" on FB, Click "Get" on the iTunes store), that the conversions (and cost per conversion) are impressively high.
A bit of background - I've been running a bunch of campaigns on FB recently for an e-commerce site which is not mobile optimized. Our conversion (both clicks and purchases) from mobile massively trumps the desktop.
I could bid higher for desktop, but that would increase my cost per conversion. It obviously varies from campaign to campaign and client to client, but it's safe to say that I've moved almost entirely to mobile. It was even better when mobile was newer and CPCs were far lower.. but that's another story. The gold rush is over for marketers.
I'm stuck in a mentality where facebook was where I chatted to friends, suggested things to do, occasionally told people what I was up to, and joined such luminary groups as "I want to punch slow walking people in the back of the head".
If Facebook knows this to be true it would result in them being willing to pay higher valuation for mobile companies than other acquirers because google won't know nor will yahoo msft etc because none of them have scale in mobile to understand these powerful secular trends and in essence they under value mobile vs FB and thus under invest and fall farther and farther behind."
Am I the only one who thinks it's a bit naive to assume that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft..etc don't understand that mobile is dominating desktop because they don't have the mobile scale of FB? It seems like an obvious insight in today's world.
In fact one could argue that Yahoo REALLY understands it considering the shopping spree for mobile first companies these past 2 years.
Google controls the #1 smartphone OS by marketshare and serves mobile ads over Google search products (& GMail now) to a large number of users.
Unless there is an inherently different value for mobile-social ads than just normal mobile/mobile-productivity ads I'm not sure how this would make sense.
That's not the guys point. He's considering whether the mobile ads are more engaging than the desktop ones which is not clear cut. I use my mobile a lot but I can't even recall reading an ad. I'm sure I've scrolled past some. It's possible Facebook has figured how to get people to read the things and have people buy stuff while the other companies have not yet.
This is the same logical fallacy that people try to use to say search ads don't work. CTRs on search are 2-5% so it doesn't matter if you click on it or not - they only need 5 people out of 100 to do so.
For display & mobile, the CTRs are even lower so there should be even more people who say "i never click on an ad." Advertisers will keep spending money anyway.
This wasn't some formal document from the office of the CFO. It was a quick, brief analysis between individuals that normally would have never been made public. And we don't know the circumstances that day. He could have been writing this in a car on the way to the airport or a million other scenarios.
It's hilarious people commenting on spelling, grammar and the light detail as though every email they've ever sent is Shakespearan in its quality.
That said, all of this business cat stuff is way over my head. I have no idea whether it's interesting or not.
Same here, someone please annotate this Sony Wikileaks leak on Genius.com or something! I'd really like to understand it. Genius.com would be perfect for such a thing.
I often visit threads and see the top-most comments being somewhat incredulous reactions to a (percieved) large number of sentiments to their contrary, so it would certainly be interesting to see at what point threads begin to evolve a critical mass in terms of which 'side' of a discussion a reply is likely to take.
- Facebook makes money on desktop ads and mobile ads - They are making less money on desktop - They are making more money on mobile - They may be seeing trends before anybody else that mobile is where they will make money - So they might value engaging mobile apps more than competitors
Thus, as Snapchat, you realize that FB is willing to pay a lot of $$, but also that what you have (the active users on mobile) is valuable and will continue to grow in value. It's interesting because it sheds light on what went into Snapchat's decision to reject the acquisition.
YMMV of course, but iOS/Android (and Dragon/et. al.) are pretty good at recognizing words, less so entire sentences - and remember, this is 5 years ago, so adjust accordingly (unsurprisingly, consumer-grade speech recognition has improved dramatically in the past half-decade).
Not just in the sense that they are cleverly disguised, a clumsy scroll attempt often ended up triggering an ad click for me.
Yes they are free. But they gamified in app purchases extremely well. I know of CEOs and accountants who have dropped $50-100 on games like this who have never touched a computer game before. It's pretty amazing to see.
It is a "fad" in the same way that Nintendo, Blizzard, Valve etc are fads.
Provided Facebook can match up the ads to the before/after feed content it would make sense that they would do well from it.
I think it's safe to say that 99.99%+ of app installs are on purpose. No one really "accidentally" installs an app on his or her phone.
of my usage: Apple-owned apps, Spotify (premium only), Vimeo, SoundCloud, WhatsApp, Dropbox, Trello, Reddit.
you can't blame the NSA for having agents reading your private email and looking through your private Internet traffic, if you are going to turn around and do the same thing at the first opportunity.
To me, your position is like, as we say in my country, "covering the sun with a sieve". The act is done, trying to oppose it now is futile.
I don't think there's a strong enough consensus on the leaked data to warrant flagging. Certainly legitimate to downvote the link, but a flagging should require communal consensus on a position, no?
The context is missing here. They could've been chatting online or in person and he sent a quick 15 minute followup. Maybe they're friends who have this kind of casual grammar established. I've written things like this before when I knew the person and conveying information quickly was all I really cared about.
if a sentence is confusing to read, then the reader can be distracted from the concept and pushed into trying to decipher what they are trying to say.
i'd say certain mistakes are worse than others, if the two words are pronounced the same, then the reader can easily read over the error.
I think more distracting mistakes like "than" instead of "then" where, not only are they pronounced different, but can be used in the same place in a sentence, but with drastically different effect:
> this is great news for Snapchat as you are mobile first and mobile only and if the user base on mobile is bigger than desktop (which I think it is by a magnitude or more) than you will be valued more favorably than before in absolute terms and long term at scale you will be more value than desktop companies at scale
he uses than 3 times, one of which (the middle "than") should be a "then", just makes this harder to parse.
TL;DR: if your job is communicating, then grammar is not for impressing, it's for doing your job.
Email was sent on April 24, 2014.