
When Facebook goes down, an economy goes with it - ciccionamente
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/14/18265002/facebook-instagram-outage-ad-revenue-lost
======
imagetic
I've yet to see any stats from companies I work with that are heavily invested
in Facebook who aren't just lying to themselves in meetings. The stats seem
suspiciously off and their media content get almost zero interaction despite
millions of followers. Which seems normal these days as Facebook and Twitter
attempt to stay relevant.

But if all your chips are in Facebook, you've built a pretty weak business
model. It's been about 2 years since I've been on Facebook, and I didn't even
know about the outage until I went to a meeting with a client and they were
all freaking out.

~~~
cm2012
The majority of marketing/ad teams nowadays are performance based. It is
trivial to see what your approximate ROI is for FB ad spend. Source: I have
been part of marketing teams at many venture backed and public companies and
seen the data myself.

~~~
rightbyte
Do FB give you data for the controll group, target demographic FB users that
did not see the add? Ie. whats the difference in ROI for 0$ and $$$?

~~~
cm2012
It's even simpler than that. At the most basic, just count how many people
convert on your site that entered the site with FB as the referrer.

------
duxup
"an economy"

I think maybe "a market" maybe works better here?

I get there's a thing happening here but if they're not spending that money on
Facebook, can they spend it elsewhere? Or won't folks spending it because of
facebook ads just spend that money elsewhere?

~~~
kaycebasques
They use the example of one company that lost revenue, which implies a market,
but the underlying idea is that a lot of companies from many markets depend on
this ad channel. Hence, an economy.

~~~
duxup
Ah, I don't think I thought of it that way as far as definitions go.
Interesting, thanks.

------
maccio92
oh boo fucking hoo. companies paying tens of thousands of dollars to shove
their ads in your face were unable to shove their ads in your face for a few
hours. how tragic.

~~~
CDSlice
It also brought down Khan Academy's login system because they support Facebook
logins and apparently never expected that to go down.

~~~
decebalus1
That's awesome! Facebook login is cancer and should die.

~~~
fvjft
Facebook login has value for many people. It certainly makes it easier to
create new accounts and then log into 3rd party websites.

~~~
youeseh
If it went down, it may create much more value for many more people! =)

------
bemmu
Impressive that they are selling $8-10k/day in false eyelashes ($12/piece) and
meme products ($9.99, $29.99).

------
Hoasi
Relying on Facebook for a sizeable part of your business is rather foolish.

~~~
standardUser
It's not about relying, it's about what works. A lot of companies advertise
across Google, Facebook, television, radio, podcasts etc, but Facebook is
frequently the best ROI for reasons that are entirely beyond an individual
company's control. For some markets, there is simply no better ad platform
than Facebook.

------
identity_zero
In parts of the developing world, Facebook is used sort of like Craigslist to
connect buyers and sellers, with the prospective client's friends list acting
as a reputation system. Instead of this person to person bartering system, the
developed world relies on advertisements and influencers for commerce. There's
a Bloomberg article that goes deeper into this but I can't find it right now.

------
thrusong
Are we even going to get a post-mortem on this? It seems substantial enough to
warrant explanation, but they're usually a lot quicker than this...

------
taude
What about the economical gains from employees not wasting time on Facebook or
otherwise doing something else more meaningful?

~~~
randomsearch
Serious question - is this still a thing? I’ve only seen one, older, relative
use Facebook in that way in the last few years. Do people really still use it
as a distraction at work? The quality of content is so terrible I can’t stand
scrolling for very long.

~~~
taude
Yeup. I walk through the cube farm here every now and then and I see people
with FB on their screens. I'm sure there's things they could be doing other
than perusing the feed (like messaging, event planning, etc.)...

I also work in a meeting heavy culture where people will be on Instagram
scrolling their feed while someone is talking on a conference call....

------
minsight
There are things that shouldn't be sold and ways that things shouldn't be
sold. A better market for false eyelashes shouldn't come at the cost of the
many abominations that Facebook has introduced into your world.

------
Gys
Sounds like ‘to big to fall’ which to me is one more reason to let it go down.

~~~
duado
Would you say the same thing about say, the electrical grid?

~~~
Gys
The electric grid is a public service. In Europe the actual wires are owned
and maintained by a state company. Private companies compete by 'delivering'
the actual energy.

Lets imagine the wires and delivering is all in the hands of one profit
maximizing company. Because of their monopoly they increase prices every year,
offer services like TV for free (to kill TV companies) and then start selling
TV as well.

So yes, FB should really go down and be replaced with something else. Maybe
governement owned infrastructure. They could then see everything, a difficult
privacy problem, but I am pretty sure they do now already anyway.

------
daenz
Pretty interesting headline considering a lot of talk lately about breaking up
Big Tech.

------
hateful
Good.

