Are They Social Media or Advertising Companies? What is the Difference?
Are They Social Media or Advertising Companies? What is the Difference?
Facebook is a media company…right? Yes, that's correct, but those who argue that Facebook has grown into an advertising company have a very valid argument. Facebook's business is nearly 100% driven by advertising. And even with all the negativity swirling around the company, advertisers say they have no plans to pull budgets. That's because advertisers essentially have no alternative. Facebook is unparalleled in terms of scale and its ability to deliver targeted ads using data. While many other marketers in today’s digital age refute that they have other places to advertise besides Facebook (like Google’s YouTube), cutting Facebook ads would directly hurt their businesses. That’s because it’s hard to look past Facebook’s reach. With nearly 3 billion active users, that’s a whole lot of people seeing Facebook ads on a regular basis. When it comes to detailed targeting, Facebook is almost unparalleled. It knows so much about its users, and this information helps advertisers reach the right people with the right message. Facebook ads can also accurately target specific groups of people as it draws in nearly 10 million active advertisers and earns Facebook $28.6 billion per quarter. As mentioned earlier, Facebook’s biggest competitor within the “online ad” space would be YouTube.
However, YouTube ads tend to have a reputation of mistargeting ads and in 2017, many major companies said they would halt advertising on YouTube due to hateful content on the platform. YouTube responded by introducing a new set of “brand safety” controls, including “removing ads more effectively from content that is attacking or harassing people based on their race, religion, gender or similar categories,” Google’s chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, said in a blog post. The company says it prohibits “content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups,” based on attributes ranging from race and ethnicity to gender and sexual orientation, and Schindler promised to aggressively go after violators. Over a three-month period in 2019, YouTube said it removed more than 17,000 channels and 100,000 videos for violating its rules on hate. Most of the advertisers that boycotted YouTube in 2017 came back, and its primary source of profit remains selling the attention of its billions of users. Advertising on YouTube earned parent company Google almost $20 billion in advertising revenue in 2019 alone. Although Facebook faces many of the same accusations regarding the censorship (or lack thereof) of its platforms, its advertising tends to be favored more by marketers due to its specific targeting abilities.
Facebook knows almost everything about you, and although many people in the digital age have come to accept it, for better or for worse, it's important that point be reiterated. Their strategic and specific targeting abilities come from the fact that they know what their users like and don’t like. “The amount of data Facebook and the others have on us is absurd,” says Jake Moore, cybersecurity specialist at ESET. “With data being the preferred currency of current times, it is no wonder personal information is so sought after. It is used as part of a massive algorithm honed in on each and every user to profit from via analyzing our movements and purchases.” Moore further advises to make secondary emails to purchase items and to turn off the Off-Facebook Activity tool and iPhone App Tracking Transparency (ATT) setting. The argument that companies like Facebook and Google aren’t technology or media companies anymore but advertising ones, is a very real one. Yes, they invest large amounts of money into tech startups and software maintenance, but their ad revenue is what allows these companies to grow bigger and collect more data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrfHzwffo7E
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