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Facebook May Finally Have To Compromise Its User Experience In Order To Keep Growing (recode.net)
Tony Haile, writing for Recode: Facebook has a problem. What has driven its growth for the last five years won't drive its growth for the next five. However, the options in front of the company involve the kind of user experience compromises that have maimed platforms that preceded it. Facebook makes its money from the West. Some 30 percent of its users and 73 percent of its revenue is from North America and Europe. The monthly average revenue per user for Western users is $3.33 versus 53 cents for the rest of the world. Facebook is a global company, but a Western business. Facebook's user growth in the West is a little over 1 percent a quarter. In North America, Facebook's monthly active users represent 80 percent of the population above the age of 14. If Facebook wishes to grow its Western revenue at the rate its shareholders demand, a 1 percent user growth rate will not do it. Absent rapid user growth, the other lever for increasing advertising revenue is increasing the number or value of ads that are shown to existing users. However, the News Feed is close to saturation. Facebook believes that it cannot stick any more ads in the News Feed without adversely affecting user retention. This combination of slowing user growth and News Feed saturation has led Facebook to warn of a rapid deceleration in revenue growth over the next six months. For the first time in years, Facebook needs a new lever to pull.
but I don't see any advertisements. Ever.
No game crap and only a few reminders that I asked for.
Of course, that's because I installed adblock and anti-js tracker everywhere I go. So that may have something to do with it.
Whatever money FB is making off me can't be all that much.
Will raise that without compromising user experience- by targeting the advertising better. Especially real life community groups.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Who didn't see this coming..
Their user experience has been compromised for ages. I've largely given up following anything. Between the amazingly poor ads, the random ordering of posts and all the fake news and click bait, it's about 92% crap. What's next auto-playing videos? Oh wait, they have those as well. Maybe they'll just start saying "Facebook has detected a virus!" Actually, they kind of already do that as well. They just don't offer to sell you something to "fix" the problem.
Maybe a new cell phone? Oops there as well. Maybe they'll just start calling people and asking them to go online.
I don't know, but it works for me.
What is Facebook?
kbye. I hope the company dies. It's entire reason to be is to 'compromise' its users.
>> Facebook needs a new lever to pull.
I've got your lever right here.
Well, what these companies typically do is make the changes that alienate larger and larger fractions of their old customers (e.g., Ebay). Investors then accept whatever the resulting growth rate is. They accept that rate because it's the maximum they can have. And psychologically, that's all they really want: the maximum. The actual growth rate is what it is, and their greedy little minds accept that. Then everyone quits talking about that particular company. They just click along making all the money that they can make. As long as they are still profitable, all is well.
It's not just about filling the newsfeed, it's about capitalizing on the brand to expand the company into other profitable markets. A subscription-based video content service, for example, including compelling original content. Perhaps some solid work on modern education and making various learning opportunities scalable and effective. A solid services recommendation system (which they've worked on but it doesn't seem to be there yet).
There are lots of markets out there, but if they want a return on capital, they will have to innovate.
Real lawyers write in C++
I have been waiting for this moment for some years, the point at which we get to "..witness the power of this fully operational personal data trove". Facebook and Google has more information about people than any other companies.
As pressure for profit increases, more and more uses for this data will be found. I fear that the most revenue-generating uses might be the ones that negatively impacts peoples lives in a big way. Like health insurance, mortgages, recruitment or predictive law enforcement.
Facebook makes money off of advertisement data, they don't have to make it all from advertising. They have such an enormous presence online they can sell user data to other websites for targeted advertisements and not degrade their user experience any.
..so how is it really any worse if they compromise the 'user experience', too?
I cannot stand auto-play videos and sound. It hogs bandwidth, slows page loads, and wakes up everybody in the house if you forget to turn the volume off. If I wake up my wife, it's doghouse time for me.
They finally perfected site-selective auto-play prevention plugins for Flash, but not for the newer HTML5 videos. We'll probably have to wait a year or so until those work right.
And now co's are trying to use JavaScript-based movies, as CPU's get faster. They don't force sound (so far), but still are annoying.
Table-ized A.I.
...experiencing Facebook in order to grow intellectually.
The shareholders seem to think we live in an infinite world with an infinite number of people with internet access. However, reality doesn't fit their growth models based on unicorn farts and pixie dust.
#DeleteFacebook
I suspect there isn't one. The market is saturated, and the service is mature. When people are your only product, and there are no more people signing on to become your products, you're fucked. Earlier on they should have tried out a subscription service model to see if it would fly. It's probably too late for that now - nobody is going to pay for Facebook, because the company has already added pretty well all the features that they might have had a chance of charging subscribers for.
After the Internet itself, Facebook might be the next thing that really needs to be put under public control. The 'net is already critical infrastructure, and should have been taken over in the public interest long ago. Facebook is starting to look pretty infrastructure-ish - it's getting harder for people to land jobs without having an active account there, and travel into and out of the US may soon be difficult for those who don't have a social media presence. Not that Facebook, (or the Internet), will ever become part of the commons; but it's nice to dream those liberal dreams...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Facebook has already compromised it's user experience with countless experiments. My wife as a family photographer no longer has any organic reach on Facebook. Content creators had enjoyed some advantage over other businesses but Zero organic reach has eliminated that.Likes and followers are almost meaningless.
Google is a superior advertising experience by far.
Oh. Yeah. They're only *now* going to compromise their user experience.
Also, who gives a fuck.
Too early for funny or anything closer to insight? Anyway...
Certainly Facebook deserves bankruptcy. Try to imagine if all the time wasted on Facebook was invested in ANYTHING useful. Too bad it isn't going to happen.
Facebook has first-mover advantage in an age of cancer. Humans are social animals, and even the extremely fake social is highly attractive, even addictive, to many people. Maybe the entire system will collapse and take Facebook down with it, but I'm not advocating for the Trump solution.
Is there any solution? Maybe, but I doubt it. Just increase the VALUE of the human time spent on Facebook so it isn't such a total waste of humanity. Unfortunately, that would require tracking and visualizing the reputation, which would add complexity that Facebook doesn't want to invest in.
Even worse, Facebook would have to change their business philosophy as regards the time of members. Right now Facebook thinks MORE time (wasted or not) is ALWAYS better, and they are NOT interested in helping members know when to stop wasting time. As long as Facebook claims MORE time, it's more fake money in the fake market cap.
Enough time "invested" in Slashdot, but I'll close with my favorite joke these days: Details available upon polite and sincere request. ROFLMAO.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I love how the basis of our entire economic system is built around unending growth. That's all you ever hear about, the company has to grow, our economy has to grow, grow, grow, grow. Yep I can't see any long term problem with unlimited exponential growth, no siree.
... what do the non-Western countries want?
Most have their own "Facebook," and it's going to be difficult to pry those consumer's minds from their current form of online drug.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I think they said the other day that 25% of the world uses FB. I bet not even 25% of the world drinks Coke. A fourth of the world... that's effectively saturation. The other 75% doesn't want it, doesn't care, or has some other substitute that's baked into their life in such a way that FB can't pry them away. Ever.
When you start measuring your market penetration in terms of global percentages like that, growth is done. All they can do now is acquire some other business like Amazon just did with Whole Foods. It's nothing but M & A from here on out. It'll still make money; but if you're thinking of FB as any kind of growth stock, you deserve exactly what you get. Best case scenario for the company is it become a utility-like stock and starts paying dividends. Best case scenario for the planet is they FOAD, but that's just my opinion.
Let it die.
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media barons have become cancerous, legitimate threats to nations' security by their frivolity and incompetence. Websites have even come to rely on them, Google, and others as authorities on "identity" with lunacy like "social sign-on" being somehow an acceptable means of authentication after all the revelations we've seen regarding fake users all over Twitter, Facebook, and friends.
We've got to balkanize the Internet before these guys try to legislate their mandate on the way down. Do you want a "digital passport" that requires your use of, say, Facebook? Or to really trust any of these big corps to handle your data In the age of Big Leaks, and pointed social media? Talk of The Zuck gearing up for a run in politics should be raising some serious red flags.
I'd rather see smaller communities to mid-sized communities with some chain of custody on user identity, with system administrators who are a few degrees of separation away instead of nebulous Facebook Review Teams, and the ability to concretely state when 100 users from Romania are trying to push this or that idea on your small town news forum in North Dakota which happened to trust in FB to provide user authentication.
We do NOT need more administrative rhetoric about the Internet as a "Wild West", we need solutions that do not involve sacrificing our freedoms. If we are to inhabit the Wild West, then our towns will the ability to sheriff and hold those sheriffs accountable. I can't say I trust Facebook's recent announcement of a renewed mission to "bring people together" very much in this overly legalistic atmosphere.
All that energy and processing power being wasted as people numbly gaze into their screen scrolling through an endless feed of garbage. What Facebook need to do is make their own Facebook clients which exploit that processing power and turn it into something valuable. A browser or app, that uses some of the power of their users devices to do some processing of data. Facebook could then sell processing time to companies. All this would happen in the background and the user would barely notice. Think amazon cloud, but using some kind of peer to peer system.
Why it's almost as though a business model that requires perpetual growth is inherently unsustainable. Crazy.
They've been changing the behavior of certain things for years now, driving people nuts!
The USA is a saturated market for most things, the growth potential in the USA is low and the population of the USA is about 4% of the worlds population.
Asia is where the real growth is and Asia contains about 60% of the worlds population.
If Trump goes down the trade war route, he is going to find US companies get locked out of Asia as well as other parts of the world.
US companies if the wish to grow are going to have to abandon "USA culture", the rest of the world wants their culture and cultural values to be represented and presented to them.
Facebook are already bringing in billions. Just fucking sit back and enjoy it, and don't mess with the cash cow.
When did Facebook ever have a good user experience?
Despite all efforts and despite pretending that it might be possible, it isn't. At some point you can sustain what you got, but you cannot expand anymore. At least not without bursting.
Ask any bubble.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is good news for Facebook shareholders.
With no competition from Google, Facebook's data will be more valuable.
(Note that the original article talked of a slowing of the *rate of growth* of profits, not the profits themselves.)
What is really needed is a more distributed web. There should be no central holder of social medial. Something like web feeds with some intersite authentication. But that never took off.
I thought Facebooks user experience always sucked. It's just that the real lives of Facebook users suck even more, so they stick around every day gobbling the poop because at least it tastes better than pile of shit that serves as a miserable excuse for a life. Oh, and can you please tell me what your pet ate for dinner tonight?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Facebook has been compromising its user experience from day one!
This combination of slowing user growth and News Feed saturation has led Facebook to warn of a rapid deceleration in revenue growth over the next six months. For the first time in years, Facebook needs a new lever to pull.
"A rapid deceleration in revenue growth". So they are still going to make money? They are still going to make more money than they ever did in the past? Only the RATE of revenue growth is going to drop, and this is a cause for panic? Here's what is wrong with the US economic system.
An Open letter to Facebook,
I love your product, and I find it a really useful service. Can you please introduce a version where I pay $3 per month, and you move all the brains selling ads over to providing a better user experience for me.
Anyone else with me?
Let us move to Mastodon
Let's not forget that Facebook is an advertising company. They don't produce any consumer product or service. Facebook apps serve the same function as Modern Family does for ABC: to get you to watch advertisements. The total spent on advertising world-wide in all media is around $400 billion (USD). Television is still the largest media, but internet (in all its forms) is catching up. (Radio, print, and others are much smaller.) Let's say that the total internet advertising world-wide is around $100-150 B. (I don't know the exact numbers.) This means that Facebook is already capturing 20-30% of the total world-wide market. How much bigger can they get?
COE
Certainly Facebook deserves bankruptcy. Try to imagine if all the time wasted on Facebook was invested in ANYTHING useful. Too bad it isn't going to happen.
Think of days before Facebook, the supposedly available "free time" was not "invested" anywhere.
Tat Tvam Asi
I was idly flipping through teh Facebook because I had nothing better to do and I passed by a movie trailer (advertisement) that I wanted to watch. Well, halfway through the trailer an ad for a local car dealership was injected. So, now even the advertisements have advertisements!
You didn't read the post you responded to.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
So, intrusive data sharing and frenetic advertising only pays $3.33 per month? Is privacy worth that little to people that they let Mark Zuckerberg do that to them?
Selling something that has some value to me? Something that isn't timewasting, trivial, and pointless? Something that isn't stupid like whether you are hungry now, or your nipples are erect, or there is a ringing in your ear?
Screw Facebook.