After Sheryl Sandberg’s departure, how long does Facebook have left? - New Statesman
▻https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/big-tech/2022/06/how-long-does-facebook-have-left
The scrappy start-up had morphed into a global advertising behemoth with tens of thousands of employees but its size, reach and revenues failed to protect it from the shifting sands of digital culture and the perils of the attention economy. Since the start of this year, Facebook’s market capitalisation has fallen by 43 per cent.
The received wisdom is that TikTok is to blame for Facebook’s woes. While Zuckerberg and Sandberg controversially secured permission to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014 respectively, TikTok has remained firmly beyond their grasp. Although Zuckerberg has launched a copycat feature called Reels, it is failing to drive as much revenue as his other products.
Facebook’s problems, however, may reflect a deeper trend within the advertising ecosystem. In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang argues that the effectiveness of online ads has been dramatically exaggerated by the American tech giants. As the inefficiency of their commercial offering has been exposed over time, says Hwang, Facebook and Google have been forced to litter their platforms with ever more ad units.
They “force more and more ads into an experience, or into a social media channel, in order to make the same amount of money… and that has the perverse effect of squeezing people away from those platforms,” said the former Google employee in a New Statesman interview earlier this year. The tech giants’ solution to this challenge, Hwang believes, is to direct users to new platforms, before they become so saturated with advertising that they too become unusable.
Beyond buying competitors, copying rivals, producing more products and lobbying for favourable regulations, there is another trick social media companies use to maintain growth expectations and market share. They build ever higher walls around their platforms.