It is true that small businesses usually rely on advertising. In recent years, due to the popularity of social media, and Facebook ‘s monopoly in that area, that means that many small businesses are dependent on Facebook. But it doesn’t have to be that way – small businesses would still find other places to advertise in targeted ways even if Facebook didn’t exist, not to mention its highly recommended targeting and tracking features. Consider the statistics that Facebook put into its ads. What is the fact that 44 percent of small businesses effectively increased advertising during the pandemic? It’s just that, during the pandemic, more people are engaged at home, and Facebook’s monopoly advertising network is seeing more consumption as a result. More businesses are advertising over it as more customers on the field are looking at their phones. This figure largely does not indicate that small businesses benefit from advertising on Facebook, just that they have no other choice.
The company also notes that, without targeting, sales for small businesses would be down 60 percent for every dollar spent on Facebook ads. But that could be misleading if it doesn’t speak to the possibility that these businesses are identifying other places to reach customers. We already know that without a focus based on personal optimization, advertising on Facebook would not be as effective. Remember, in a Facebook advertising network, a place to sell at an auction price, means with less efficiency in targeting, the price of advertising on Facebook would decrease at the same time – which opens more marketing budget for small businesses for advertising elsewhere. The result? Apple’s policy will take advantage of surveillance capitalism, and pass that profit back to traditional media and advertising businesses that give small businesses more opportunities to get the word out about their products and services. A more meaningful number for Facebook is to report how declining advertising options are linked, if at all, to the overall commercial success of small businesses – not their sales rates on Facebook itself. Facebook can search and report on the former, but it is well known that such a survey would not provide a useful number for their purposes.
Of course, in the short term, these changes cause a few headaches in updating advertising and code campaigns. But people will still want to buy local produce, support mom-and-pop stores, and donate to their neighborhood charities. At the same time, Facebook is inevitably changing its advertising technologies and developing new ways to track users in an accurate and anonymous way across its applications – tactics that will help the industry advertising to maintain profit while respecting Apple’s new compliance restrictions.
And aren’t those changes that the public should want, anyway? At the end of the day, small business owners are individual citizens and consumers as well. They care about privacy, just as anyone should – and any increase in data privacy, peripheral or otherwise, is an economic benefit to users. Local and digitally-competitive small businesses will still be able to compete fairly – and now, their owners will have a little more privacy protection. Any policy change comes with trade value; it can be said that even if there were advertisers carry out experiencing a small blow in advertising soon, it is good nonetheless for the whole of society with the benefits in privacy and individual independence that come as well.
What, then, is Facebook talking about in its full-page ads? Not surprisingly, what struck his own business – and business model. It is the practices of targeting an ad and monitoring direct communication that make Facebook so powerful in the digital ecosystem. We know that Facebook ‘s highly controlling share – over 98 per cent – of Facebook’ s global revenue, which in 2019 was over $ 70 billion, comes from advertising. Even a 5 percent blow to that equates to a loss of billions of dollars a year, a cut that Facebook’s financial community – which includes the company’s own capitalists, shareholders, and officers and employees – doesn’t. to see.