Andrew Bosworth on FB ads

Ad networks, most notably Facebook and Google, provided solutions to advertisers’ buying problems. The main thing they provided was more data on consumers.

Audience buying is cloaked in opacity – the major platforms are deeply invested in making sure no one truly understands how attention is priced. That means a media company buying audience on Facebook or Google will always be at an informational disadvantage – exposing them to a new kind of arbitrage, one executed by the platform’s own algorithms an... See more

So I think Facebook runs into the challenge of, "Okay, we're trying to shift people into stories, we're trying to shift people into the marketplace, we're trying to get people to use messenger and build this WeChat-like ecosystem within our messaging product. But our Feed makes so much money, it's on autopilot right now, so how do we make that tran... See more

The reality is that if your goal is to optimize revenue to the company, shutting down APIs, algorithmically manipulating users, harvesting personal information for better ad targeting, reducing revenue shares, and all the things people don’t like about internet companies is the optimal strategy.

First, some background. I ran search ads at Google for over a decade, and I could see the inexorable pressure to take up more and more space with ads. It’s one of those things where there's just so much money to be made that people come up with cleverer and cleverer theories to justify why it’s okay.