
More Than 1k Companies Boycotted Facebook. Did It Work? - adrian_mrd
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/business/media/facebook-boycott.html
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caiobegotti
The boycott, more than anything internal to those companies (like reduced
expending as an experiment during the pandemics), were a message instead of a
direct hit at Facebook. Hubris can be a dangerous toy to play with and I hope
for their best that folks at Facebook paid attention to this boycott and won't
simply go "lalala you can't hurt us lalala".

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SpicyLemonZest
Facebook's paid attention pretty publicly, openly stating their commitment to
opposing hate speech promising to hire an executive-level person in charge of
civil rights. Some groups have complained that Facebook won't adopt their
preferred speech codes, but I largely think it's a good thing that Facebook
won't change its policies to prohibit unpopular speech.

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igravious
The NY Times is an "old" media company. Facebook is a "new" media company.
They are both chasing the same customers (advertisers) with the aim of
lightening their customers pockets in return for putting their customers'
brands in front of their audiences' eyeballs.

Every old media company story about new media companies is potentially rife
with conflicts of interest. Keep this in mind at all times.

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marcandre
The NY Times gets 2/3rd of its revenue from subscribers; advertisers are not
their prime customers.

Source: [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/06/new-york-times-ad-revenue-
to...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/06/new-york-times-ad-revenue-to-fall-at-
least-50percent-in-the-second-quarter.html)

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manfredo
Because the internet gutted its ad revenue. Back in 2000 the paper's strength
was in its advertising: [https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/14/business/times-co-
profit-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/14/business/times-co-profit-is-
up-35-on-strength-in-advertising.html)

Over the course of the 2000s, the stock price of the NYT would drop to less
than one quarter of what it was in 2000, and only start to climb back up in
late 2016 and early 2017.

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shalmanese
I find people have a very hard time reasoning about the effect of dynamic
systems with strong homeostasis.

A prime example of this would be "ESG funds" that promise to divest from eg,
oil companies. The oil company is still making the same amount of revenues and
profits independent of whether you own shares, you selling your shares just
means some hedge fund would buy more of them than they ordinarily would and
the share price stays mostly the same.

In this case, Facebook's business is monetizing eyeballs. The number of
eyeballs is independent of whether advertisers are boycotting, it just means
the non-boycott companies see larger inventory, adjust their ad spend up and
the total revenue to Facebook remains largely the same.

