Nice article! I think it overstates the level of crisis/change for Facebook a bit:
- IMO the ad business is still moving along nicely; revenues are very slightly down year over year but compared to 2020 and all previous years they are significantly up.
- iOS 14.5 definitely negatively impacted advertisers' results, but Facebook remains the best option available for a wide swath of use cases -- which is why the ad revenues remain strong
- From the ad buying side, I wouldn't describe what they are undertaking as a complete overhaul; they are definitely going to try and implement on-device learning and other attribution solutions, but the process will be gradual and they'll try to retain a lot of the attribution systems in place right now so that advertisers don't experience further disruption in what they're able to report on.
The stock is down but that may have more to do with broader market trends or anticipation that TikTok and others are going to steal market share in the future --- but that hasn't really happened yet!
Nice article! I think it overstates the level of crisis/change for Facebook a bit:
- IMO the ad business is still moving along nicely; revenues are very slightly down year over year but compared to 2020 and all previous years they are significantly up.
- iOS 14.5 definitely negatively impacted advertisers' results, but Facebook remains the best option available for a wide swath of use cases -- which is why the ad revenues remain strong
- From the ad buying side, I wouldn't describe what they are undertaking as a complete overhaul; they are definitely going to try and implement on-device learning and other attribution solutions, but the process will be gradual and they'll try to retain a lot of the attribution systems in place right now so that advertisers don't experience further disruption in what they're able to report on.
The stock is down but that may have more to do with broader market trends or anticipation that TikTok and others are going to steal market share in the future --- but that hasn't really happened yet!