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AP Photo / Karly Domb Sadof, File
A news story on TechCrunch details how Facebook is testing how to link user accounts with their newspaper and magazine subscriptions: when the social network detects that the user is subscribed, it allows the news accessed within Facebook to be displayed on in its entirety and without restrictions. , in addition to recommending more news from that same medium. The company said it had seen a 111% increase in article clicks and a 34-97% chance that the user would decide to follow the post in question.
Facebook’s business model hasn’t changed: it still manages its users, extracting as much data as it can from them. Since its origins as a social network to keep people in contact, Facebook has evolved towards a model of capturing user quotas, trying to get people to spend as much time as possible on the social network and do everything possible there. When you consume news within Facebook, you are giving the company a very rich information profile on the topics that interest you and allowing better targeted and increasingly profitable advertising. This is also useful for the company, because it means knowing more about the topics that can polarize or influence users (in gradients according to their reactions, such as “read it” versus “read it and comment”, “read it and react with a icon ”or“ read it and share it ”), which is of enormous value in electoral campaigns.
But Facebook now faces a major hurdle: the next version of iOS, Apple’s operating system, which offers users much more comprehensive information about how apps track their information. With a warning on your smartphone asking you to choose between “Allow tracking” or “Ask app not to track” your Advertising ID (IDFA), the number of users choosing to allow tracking is likely to plummet. In response, it’s not just complaining About the control Apple has over its devices: It has decided not to collect IDFA for any of its own applications on iOS 14 devices or to request IDFA from applications on the Audience Network. Facebook will also not display Apple’s consent message or ask Audience Network apps to do so on its behalf.
Unfortunately for Facebook, the update rate to the latest version of the operating system is usually very high, which means that, in a short period of time, the performance of many of its campaigns can be severely affected.
On the other side of the advertising ecosystem, in the web environment dominated by Google, things don’t look much better either: the majority browser, Chrome, has announced that it will stop supporting third-party cookies in 2022, which could deprive Facebook of visibility. on the navigation of users on other pages, especially those that incorporate company mechanisms such as likes or comments.
If advertising on the web starts to suffer because the owners of the browsers decide to make it more difficult for them, and in the apps you find that those who control a part of the terminals –even if it is the minority in many countries– do the same, Facebook can expect trouble. And in fact, the company has already started warning its shareholders on these issues in the notes accompanying its results for the second quarter of 2020.
Given that Apple now markets itself as the company that protects user privacy, and that it could, in fact, be developing its own search engine to compete with Google, Facebook’s position will be further weakened – the prospect that a significant segment of users is switching to a different search engine focused on protecting privacy is a circumstance that for Facebook, whose business model is to exploit privacy, does not sound good at all.
Things are rarely black and white, and Apple has been criticized for its “bombast” about privacy while enabling the data economy it is supposedly opposing, but in this battle and knowing the background of events, I know which side of the fence I’m still on .
