[chacha102]

Being pro-Small Business doesn’t meant you have to be pro-Advertising. Facebook makes a killing taking money from small businesses through advertising, yet it is consistently one of the lowest ROI marketing techniques, not to mention generally creates the worst UX.

Can you build a successful business on advertising? Yes. But I’d argue that you don’t need to. Almost every service I pay for came to me by word of mouth. That takes time and effort to cultivate, but it isn’t affected by a software update. Or me wanting to not share my personal data.

[spzb]

> Facebook makes a killing taking money from small businesses through advertising

It also takes a lot of money from governments and political campaigns. The micro-level targeting allows highly specific messages to be shown to people matching a specific segment and contradictory messages to be shown to another segment. It's disingenuous of Facebook to claim this is just about small business when it's arguably about undermining the foundations of democracy.

[SifJar]

Word of mouth doesn't work for super niche services/products where e.g. there's a good chance no one who's recommendations you trust would be interested in the same type of service/product

It also favours more established businesses that are more known, making it harder for new businesses to gain any traction.

I'm not keen on advertising (I use adblockers on all my devices etc.), but there are definitely some (in my opinion) some compelling arguments on both sides.

[FabHK]

> Word of mouth doesn't work for super niche services/products

Nonsense.

See, there are (were?) lots of niche specific publications and communities. They'd actually know about a subject, and provide informed and largely unbiased advice, and carry advertisement, of course. Similarly, there were regional newspapers, carrying information and advertisement of regional interest.

TV and other broad media could not steal their advertisement dollars, because that was the only way to reach the niche or region.

What Facebook is doing is to usurp all of that and monopolise advertisement, driving smaller niche and regional publishers out of business. Their hypocrisy is astounding.

> there's a good chance no one who's recommendations you trust would be interested in the same type of service/product

I think the trust problem has gotten much worse. As I said, there used to be niche publishers supporting communities (by interest or region) that were interested in keeping these sustainable long term, and therefore would not be interested in scamming their audience. Now, these publishers have been bled dry, and you have to find your information on the world wild web, where any scammer and fly-by-night producer can target you and link farm and buy fake reviews etc.

[kergonath]

Quite the contrary. Word of mouth works wonders in small, tightly-knit communities that typically form around very small niches.