diving in on Facebook reports while listening to earnings. It looks like advertising crept up to 98.4% of Q4 revenue making no mistake their entire business model continues to be tied to massive, ubiquitous and unbridled data collection in order to microtarget advertising.
Sheryl Sandberg talking up small biz benefits of targeted ads..also importance of privacy to the company. Wait until CFO section, listen closely for risk from privacy laws and Apple, Microsoft, etc rolling out tracking prevention which is clearly articulated in FB's 10k reports.
There it is. Except deceleration of revenue due to global privacy laws. "The majority of impact is ahead of us" says Facebook's CFO. This matches FB's earnings risks and flies in face with messaging FB pays lobbyists and feeds to press that privacy law will only make FB stronger
For some reason, people often put aside their common sense and buy into the idea that Facebook is massively funding lobbying efforts to weaken and kill privacy laws despite it being something consumers want and Facebook being a poster child of abuse.
CFO now pointing out how important "signals" from other people's websites to their targeted ads. 1) Safari/Edge/Firefox now block this, 2) CCPA/GDPR restrict it, 3) FB has been pushed to make changes like "Clear history." See my 2014 WSJ op-ed on this. blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2014/06/20…
It's worth pointing out all of this data Facebook is less and less likely able to collect from publishers sites (they do it across 8.4 million sites!) is not being paid to publishers or users. Facebook takes the data because they can. See @DinaSrinivasan antitrust paper for more.
@DinaSrinivasan analysts aren't happy about the deceration due to the privacy. This is 95% their fault for asking mostly weak questions on every call I've listened to since 2016...and their failure to do a redline on Facebook's changes to risks in their 10K.
@DinaSrinivasan I know, ask FB CFO about Germany's Federal Cartel Office decision limiting not just Facebook's data collection across web but across its family of apps. How would this affect FB if they lose their appeal or if it becomes a common antitrust remedy here in US or with
@vestager?
@vestager?
@DinaSrinivasan @vestager when Zuckerberg suggests "changes to the ecosystem" mainly focused on privacy laws and privacy-friendly browsers (Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, Brave) will mainly impact small businesses....
he's full of crap.
he's full of crap.
@DinaSrinivasan @vestager now Zuckerberg is explaining apps integration. He won't say why they're likely doing it which is to thwart efforts to break them up or restrict data use. No CEO would put the Facebook brand on Instagram today. It hurts value. It's like putting Boeing brand on Embraer's planes.
@DinaSrinivasan @vestager Zuckerberg now answering a concerned analyst about its preparation for 2020 election. Reminder, Zuckerberg and Sandberg didn't even have the spine (Google did) to go against President's campaign and a FB board member to ban microtargeting of political ads -> Not close to ready.
@DinaSrinivasan @vestager this seems like something. especially when the CFO is saying a majority of impact from new privacy laws and product changes is ahead of Facebook. I would bet Safari's change to Tracking Prevention to stop Facebook mining our browsing data across web is bigger than they let on. 
@DinaSrinivasan @vestager also typo here, aargh real-time tweets. should have said "For some reason, people put aside common sense and buy into the idea that privacy law helps Facebook despite FB massively funding lobbying efforts to weaken and kill privacy laws and the law being something consumers want.
