A wake-up call for those who advertise on Facebook properties
Last week’s calamitous fall in the price of Facebook shares, which despite having changed its name to Meta still uses the FB ticker, the biggest in a single day in stock market history shows no signs of recovering, and should be a very loud wake-up call for its advertisers.
What has caused Facebook’s stock to fall so catastrophically, losing a total of more than $232 billion, a quarter of its value? Fundamentally, the risk posed to the company by having built a very important part of its business on land it doesn’t own. When Mark Zuckerberg pivoted his business to mobile platforms, he did so on Android and iOS, both owned and managed by third parties. At a certain point, one of those third parties decided, based on a commitment to the privacy of its users — and perhaps for other reasons — to limit how the apps running on it, particularly those that abused the naivety of its users to capture all their data.
Automatically, the vast majority of iOS device users decided to deny Facebook the ability to pursue us, harass us or steal our personal data, a practice the company felt was its right. Understanding the contradiction here is fundamental: for a very long time, we have believed that certain personal data should be protected, i.e. not used to segment us for the gain of advertisers. All the platforms that once…
