Facebook is a weird mass-market product because the average American tech industry pundit has very little visibility into how it’s actually used around the world.
Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop, a waste of investment. Here’s what Zuckerberg said about Watch on the earnings call:
"There are now 400 million people who use it every month, and people spend on average over 20 minutes on Watch daily."
That’s a lot more monthly active users than Snapchat has — for a part of the app which everyone automatically assumes to be a flop. That’s what global 2.3 billion users looks like: your local anecdata doesn’t tell anything.
I was super impressed on the recommendations from FB watch where I just kept it auto-playing the next and the next video. Their tech isn't as good, their videos are choppier than youtube and netflix, but their recommendations were insanely good.
-Anyone who feels strongly against Facebook will have stopped using it
If both of these are true, the typical person commenting about its evils will have a poor idea of how it's actually used. So someone telling me it's damaging my mental health because of social gratification - I haven't posted anything real-life in years - falls about as flat as someone saying Reddit is a website for sharing weight loss pictures.
There are important points to be made about Facebook but they're lost in the noise.
Seems like a problem that can be seen quite generally as well.
e.g.
Movie X is a flop, because it's opening weekend in US is disappointing. Goes on do excellently Worldwide, especially outside opening weekend.
Search engine X is a flop, because it's market share in US is negligible. Goes on to have solid user number in China and Germany.
It's probably not helped by the strong desire to link future performance predictions to easily available metrics, and never re-evaluating these. Just because the US has driven growth and profits in the past for X, doesn't mean it always will... but's it good enough for knee jerk reactions that generate views.
> "There are now 400 million people who use it every month, and people spend on average over 20 minutes on Watch daily."
Duh. Facebook starts running the videos as soon as you open the Facebook page. If you open a video and watch it, it'll start a new one in 3-4 seconds. Unless they remove these practices, it is not clear how much of that 20 minutes is due to their aggressive behavior.
Have the 2.3 billion MAU been independently verified and checked for duplicates/triplicates etc? Considering the number of people in the world, the number of people older than 13 and younger than 75, the number of active internet users and the penetration in richer countries, I seriously doubt these numbers. Turns out, others are doubting it as well: https://mashable.com/article/report-claims-half-facebook-mau...
So why is everyone uncritically peddling these numbers?
You're right that pundits, and that not that those of the US, are bad at following trends and successes in other countries.
However the Economist had an interesting take on Facebooks success outside the US: Their sales outside the US is equivalent to that of a medium size biscuit maker.
So is Watch successful because 400 million people use it, or does it also generate substantial profit for Facebook?
> Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop
Maybe. For me personally I’m just not interested.
To me it seems like yet another “me too” feature which Facebook has copied from instagram or Snapchat or whoever did it first. Not to mention I don’t care about this feature on the other platforms either.
The feature itself just looks like a desperate attempt at trying to show that they are still “innovating” their fairly stagnant platforms, just for the sake of innovating.
And here Facebook looks even more desperate in plainly “me too” copying this non-feature.
I wonder, will this large part of Facebook users that still uses the platform (and Watch) eventually migrate to Instagram as well (as most of North America and Europe appear to have done?). Or does the standard Facebook actually better cater to a large part of the world's population than Instagram?
Always mind boggling to see those margins on that sort of volume. It’s no question FB is one of the greatest money-printing machines ever built.
Where does the growth come next though? Do they need to diversify their revenue streams away from advertising? Do they just start paying out dividends or can they really reinvest earnings at a sufficient return to satisfy shareholders?
Operating costs going up makes sense if FB is hiring in order to attempt to address many of the issues that were highlighted throughout the year. I'd venture to say they will continue to grow this year, I think I just heard them mention that during the call.
Looks too stable to me (especially taking into account the scandals).
What's the definition of DAU anyway? E.g. if I used it on 2 days in a row, e.g. yesterday and today, and then do nothing, am I counted as a DAU or not for that quarter? Or maybe I have to be active for at least 50% of the total days of the quarter? Etc... .
On page 9 of the PDF it shows expenses, and it lists marketing and sales as taking as much money as Research and Development, which sounds crazy to me. Facebook seems to spend an outrageous amount of money on programmers, I assume all of which goes to R&D. Do they also have this massive sales org I wasn't aware of? Where is this cost coming from?
It’s hard not to look at this performance and take away from it that most people really don’t care about privacy. As upsetting as the thought may be to some, Mark’s hypothesis that privacy is no longer a social norm we value seems to be proven more and more right. Despite all the scandals and hearings, their DAU are more than the population of the largest countries on Earth. Short of serious legislation, what slows them down? Negative press seems to be nothing but pebbles thrown at steamroller...
Since there's no real life downside to FB using your data to show you more relevant ads, people are making the rational trade-off. Privacy issues with FB are ideology based in nature.
Its not that they dont care about privacy a number of people do as others have said their bedroom windows likely have curtains. They likely close their bathroom / bedroom doors for privacy.
The issue is they either dont truly understand the technical implications or they have already been so invested into Facebook personally and with no alternative to migrate to in sight (they bought Intagram which could of been one) they have no recourse currently. I hear it all the time here about events being vital or just connecting with family.
I share your fears, but I do have some doubts about their metrics (see the link to a chart in another thread).
But maybe (just dumping some thoughts), after the scandals, DAU and MAU might not be anymore as relevant as in the past for Facebook's data collection if users, who are now (supposed to be) more aware of their data being shared and used actively for not only good stuff, just keep using it for only e.g. trivial posts (e.g. "I bought a bike today" instead of "I support/hate the president blahblah") or maybe make it more challenging for AI/aggregation using "irony" (algorithm would understand it as it's written, but the human interpretation would actually be the opposite), etc... . But maybe I'm just a desperate deluded optimist :)
Alternatively, people do care about privacy, but they care more about the value that FB provides to them. And part of that value can be due to customer lock-in (customers want social networks where the people they interact with are).
Well, though privacy is kind of imprtant to most people, what alternatives do people have (other than stop using all social media?) I don't think the problem of Facebook is unique to them at all - data leak, fake news, whatever - they are instrinsically hard problem to solve, and frankly I don't think there would be lot of companies doing much better.
I don't think that's true. People clearly care about privacy otherwise we wouldn't have curtains and account access controls etc.
They just aren't worried enough about Facebook violating their privacy enough to stop using it. Frankly for most people that is the right decision. Facebook has done much less immoral stuff than the media would have you believe. Even the Cambridge Analytica type stuff (i.e. the obvious potential for abuse of the Friends API) was totally public at the time but nobody cared.
In the beginning, FB was college students only, then high school... Then everyone.
There was a FB group with a million users protesting the opening up of FB to their moms and grandmas.
Some friends and I created an alternative social network at our university to capitalize. In my opinion it looked better and had more features (before they opened up their API). We were college students only, and had SSL (can you imagine back then sites without SSL?!).
We were at the first techcrunch 50. We were located in "the pit".
We didn't gain much coversge we didn't get traction at our university and well, we flopped.
I talked to someone this morning who knew that people were vaguely worried about Facebook but was utterly horrified when I took the time to explain facebook/google and android/ios from a “privacy viewpoints” perspective. This is something the press doesn’t much do. It’s effective. Too bad :(
Who is "we"? You and I? Or "most people", the "average person", some abstract thing that doesn't even exist, determined by numbers? To shorten it extremely: Nobody has the right to piss away the future of humanity. If they do, they simply cease to be relevant to me, by definition. I will gladly fight them, but not ever ask for their permission or advice. Resistance to systematic mass surveillance and what hangs off that is not just a mere "social norm" like whether short or long skirts are acceptable. This is way more complex and important than all of the light-weights that don't consider it combined. Just being alive and wanting to be left alone with whatever apathy one ended up with isn't anything in the intellectual or moral arena.
I don't think the conclusion that "most people really don't care about privacy" is proved by people still using Facebook.
Just because my friend buys a pack of cigarettes a day doesn't mean he doesn't care about cancer.
My view: Loss of privacy is a negative externality of using Facebook. And we know companies can use shiny stuff (compelling-engaging products, PR, advertising, etc.) to overcome these kinds of negative externalities and keep customers coming back.
I do think that your point about serious legislation is correct. Cigarette smoking in countries with serious legislation IS down, the question is if the political will is there and if Facebook's power can or can't outweigh that political will.
Facebook is the only way a lot of people have to contact one another. I feel like only celebrities deleted FB accounts during the whole #DeleteFacebook thing. Furthermore, I think a lot of that campaign (and be honest, it was not organic. It was a purposeful campaign by news and media giants in an attempt to show they still dominated the minds of people in the world) was a battle of the old rich vs the nouveau riche as Gatsby would say.
I wrote more about this last year, specifically focusing on Zuckerberg's rumors of eyeing the presidency:
There was a "#DeleteFacebook thing" this year? I'm assuming the hashtag is from Twitter which is insanely funny to me, since I see no difference between all of these social networks. BTW outside of USA and a few west european countries people barely know what Twitter is.
In any case I feel that all this focus on Facebook makes people forget that Instagram is far more important now then any other social network, and also the fastest growing one.
I hope this will pierce the HN anti-FB bubble somewhat. It's dangerous to believe one's own BS. FB is here to stay, although I do believe it will wither in the long term (5+ years).
Just continues to show, privacy issues don't matter to companies because it doesn't affect profitability and the stock price. Even with barrage of constant #deletefb and "I deleted my facebook" posts, it didn't actually matter. Essentially no change to daily active users and advertising revenue.
> Facebook’s daily to monthly user ratio, or stickiness, held firm at 66 percent where it’s stayed for years, showing those still on Facebook aren’t using it much less.
What are the precise definitions of daily and monthly active users? To be a daily user, do you literally have to use Facebook every day for a month?
Facebook is taking the opportunity to air some of their dirty laundry. They realize that it takes quite a bit for users to abandon the platform and are probably strategically, leaking some of this stuff.
I am happy that Facebook endure this organized media smearing attacks. It is very obvious to me someone wants to shape a narrative against Facebook, and it is distasteful to dress such intention under an altruistic disguise, like destroying Facebook could save the mankind. Utter nonsense.
The media bias against Facebook has become outrageous and it worsened after the establishment in DC extended their witch hunt and made Facebook the scapegoat for the 2016 election.
I’m growing more and more convinced that the only real way for employees to enact real
change at their company is for them to become a significant, united group of shareholders and force changes from the top. Unions sure as hell aren’t being encouraged. Unfortunately this would not work in Facebook since Zuck still has a controlling interest but it might work for others. Does that make sense?
The only thing that bothers me about Facebook anymore is the realization that I live on a planet with, literally, billions of people that do not care about their privacy.
In this era, the deeper you are able to see past the b.s that you are bombarded with, the more you will understand. Facebook has been bombarded with negative publicity for almost a year now, if you look past these articles, you will see that Facebook has not taken any sort of hit at all. Go see what the average person is like and you will understand why this is the case (This is also true for Donald Trump winning the election). We tech people live in a bubble.
[+] [-] pavlov|7 years ago|reply
Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop, a waste of investment. Here’s what Zuckerberg said about Watch on the earnings call:
"There are now 400 million people who use it every month, and people spend on average over 20 minutes on Watch daily."
That’s a lot more monthly active users than Snapchat has — for a part of the app which everyone automatically assumes to be a flop. That’s what global 2.3 billion users looks like: your local anecdata doesn’t tell anything.
[+] [-] jseliger|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eanzenberg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kurtisc|7 years ago|reply
-Anyone who feels strongly against Facebook will have stopped using it
If both of these are true, the typical person commenting about its evils will have a poor idea of how it's actually used. So someone telling me it's damaging my mental health because of social gratification - I haven't posted anything real-life in years - falls about as flat as someone saying Reddit is a website for sharing weight loss pictures.
There are important points to be made about Facebook but they're lost in the noise.
[+] [-] Plasmoid2000ad|7 years ago|reply
e.g. Movie X is a flop, because it's opening weekend in US is disappointing. Goes on do excellently Worldwide, especially outside opening weekend. Search engine X is a flop, because it's market share in US is negligible. Goes on to have solid user number in China and Germany.
It's probably not helped by the strong desire to link future performance predictions to easily available metrics, and never re-evaluating these. Just because the US has driven growth and profits in the past for X, doesn't mean it always will... but's it good enough for knee jerk reactions that generate views.
[+] [-] csomar|7 years ago|reply
Duh. Facebook starts running the videos as soon as you open the Facebook page. If you open a video and watch it, it'll start a new one in 3-4 seconds. Unless they remove these practices, it is not clear how much of that 20 minutes is due to their aggressive behavior.
[+] [-] sveme|7 years ago|reply
So why is everyone uncritically peddling these numbers?
[+] [-] mrweasel|7 years ago|reply
However the Economist had an interesting take on Facebooks success outside the US: Their sales outside the US is equivalent to that of a medium size biscuit maker.
So is Watch successful because 400 million people use it, or does it also generate substantial profit for Facebook?
[+] [-] josteink|7 years ago|reply
Maybe. For me personally I’m just not interested.
To me it seems like yet another “me too” feature which Facebook has copied from instagram or Snapchat or whoever did it first. Not to mention I don’t care about this feature on the other platforms either.
The feature itself just looks like a desperate attempt at trying to show that they are still “innovating” their fairly stagnant platforms, just for the sake of innovating.
And here Facebook looks even more desperate in plainly “me too” copying this non-feature.
[+] [-] jcfrei|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ihateyoutime|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] chollida1|7 years ago|reply
Numbers:
- 4Q EPS $2.38, Est. $2.18
- 4Q Rev. $16.91B, Est. $16.39B
- 4Q Mobile Ad Rev. as % Ad Rev. 93%
- Mobile represents 93% of ad revenue. Mark doesn't get enough credit for his big switch to mobile,
- Cost of revenue up 74 percent year over year
- Operating costs went up by 60%, Note this is more than their growth rate, really the only concerning thing from a good quarter
- Annual capex is $13.9 billion, pretty close to what Microsoft spends
- CFO is talking about phasing out Facebook only numbers and just disclosing total numbers(Insta, WhatsApp, and FB rolled into one)
-
Users:
- 4Q MAU 2.32B, Est. 2.32B
- 4Q DAU 1.52B, Est. 1.51B
- DAU up in Europe for first time in 2-3 quarters, Flat in North America
- instagram stories has 500M DAU
Misc:
- Headcount was 35,587 at year end. Increase of 42% for the year!!
- shares back up to Oct levels,
- turns out the markets like companies who can mint money and both users and advertisers just don't care at all about facebooks scandals
- https://investor.fb.com/files/doc_financials/2018/Q4/Q4-2018...
- more after hours trading than alot of stocks get during the entire day
- Zuckerberg saying that messaging growing faster than any other area. It will become more central to the social experience on Facebook's apps.
[+] [-] ham_sandwich|7 years ago|reply
Where does the growth come next though? Do they need to diversify their revenue streams away from advertising? Do they just start paying out dividends or can they really reinvest earnings at a sufficient return to satisfy shareholders?
[+] [-] LocalPCGuy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zepearl|7 years ago|reply
Looks too stable to me (especially taking into account the scandals).
What's the definition of DAU anyway? E.g. if I used it on 2 days in a row, e.g. yesterday and today, and then do nothing, am I counted as a DAU or not for that quarter? Or maybe I have to be active for at least 50% of the total days of the quarter? Etc... .
Thx
[+] [-] why_only_15|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panabee|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djsumdog|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adpirz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2012|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|7 years ago|reply
The issue is they either dont truly understand the technical implications or they have already been so invested into Facebook personally and with no alternative to migrate to in sight (they bought Intagram which could of been one) they have no recourse currently. I hear it all the time here about events being vital or just connecting with family.
[+] [-] zepearl|7 years ago|reply
But maybe (just dumping some thoughts), after the scandals, DAU and MAU might not be anymore as relevant as in the past for Facebook's data collection if users, who are now (supposed to be) more aware of their data being shared and used actively for not only good stuff, just keep using it for only e.g. trivial posts (e.g. "I bought a bike today" instead of "I support/hate the president blahblah") or maybe make it more challenging for AI/aggregation using "irony" (algorithm would understand it as it's written, but the human interpretation would actually be the opposite), etc... . But maybe I'm just a desperate deluded optimist :)
[+] [-] int_19h|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] echevil|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IshKebab|7 years ago|reply
They just aren't worried enough about Facebook violating their privacy enough to stop using it. Frankly for most people that is the right decision. Facebook has done much less immoral stuff than the media would have you believe. Even the Cambridge Analytica type stuff (i.e. the obvious potential for abuse of the Friends API) was totally public at the time but nobody cared.
[+] [-] fma|7 years ago|reply
There was a FB group with a million users protesting the opening up of FB to their moms and grandmas.
Some friends and I created an alternative social network at our university to capitalize. In my opinion it looked better and had more features (before they opened up their API). We were college students only, and had SSL (can you imagine back then sites without SSL?!).
We were at the first techcrunch 50. We were located in "the pit".
We didn't gain much coversge we didn't get traction at our university and well, we flopped.
Pricacy doesn't matter to the average user.
[+] [-] floatingatoll|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PavlovsCat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tj-teej|7 years ago|reply
Just because my friend buys a pack of cigarettes a day doesn't mean he doesn't care about cancer.
My view: Loss of privacy is a negative externality of using Facebook. And we know companies can use shiny stuff (compelling-engaging products, PR, advertising, etc.) to overcome these kinds of negative externalities and keep customers coming back.
I do think that your point about serious legislation is correct. Cigarette smoking in countries with serious legislation IS down, the question is if the political will is there and if Facebook's power can or can't outweigh that political will.
[+] [-] djsumdog|7 years ago|reply
I wrote more about this last year, specifically focusing on Zuckerberg's rumors of eyeing the presidency:
https://fightthefuture.org/article/facebook-politics-and-orw...
[+] [-] mjfl|7 years ago|reply
and after they deleted facebook, they went on their Instagrams.
[+] [-] emptyfile|7 years ago|reply
In any case I feel that all this focus on Facebook makes people forget that Instagram is far more important now then any other social network, and also the fastest growing one.
[+] [-] kerng|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ardy42|7 years ago|reply
What are the precise definitions of daily and monthly active users? To be a daily user, do you literally have to use Facebook every day for a month?
[+] [-] Shinobi881|7 years ago|reply
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