> If a significant percentage of users actually exercise this option, that will be the end of Facebook as a significant channel for ad spend. It will decimate revenue.
I don't think it would have a significant negative impact on Facebook at all. I see the value of ad networks as primarily resulting from two features: Having a large audience (network), and knowing the audience well (targeted ads).
Facebook will still have a large audience if people keep using it, even if they all delete their information, so a large audience is a given.
Knowing an audience has two large pieces, identity (i.e. you're user X) and derived identity data, i.e. people interested in HN are interested in tech. The biggest use of all this data is associating users together. If all my data across all the internet was deleted immediately, I bet Google et. al would be able to uniquely identify me within a few days, they wouldn't know I'm the same person whose data was just deleted, but they'd know a wealth of targeting information about me again, and within a few years I'd bet they'd know me just as well as they do now.
My web usage is pretty routine, and humans in general are pretty routine, so I would expect it to generally hold that, without explicit effort to the contrary, we'd all be pretty easily re-identified (at least as much as advertisers are concerned) after deleting our information, and sure, I won't be searching for that exact search query because now my git-fu has improved, but I'm still going to be doing things that identify me as someone interested in and/or using git.
Facebook is going to keep all the derived data from people, and that data is going to allow them to very easily re-target anyone once they have a good feel for what their interests are. And I can't imagine a more transparent display of interests than activity on a social network, it's almost explicitly interest-bound.
I don't think it would have a significant negative impact on Facebook at all
All I can tell you is that Facebook had a large audience before the pixel, and few advertisers were able to generate ROI from Facebook ads. Now he is suggesting that we will return to this state. Showing irrelevant ads to people based upon basic things - like being one of 150 million people that like Coke’s Facebook page - just flatly doesn’t work.
But you're not stopping pixel. You're going to be tracked again. All you're doing is resetting the clock. How long after pixel was implemented did it take for the value of Facebook ads to skyrocket? A few years? And Facebook gets to keep all that they learned during that time, just not the original data they've derived all that wealth from. It's like losing training data for ML. It's not a big deal when you get 10s if not 100s of millions or more data points every day.
I don't think it would have a significant negative impact on Facebook at all. I see the value of ad networks as primarily resulting from two features: Having a large audience (network), and knowing the audience well (targeted ads).
Facebook will still have a large audience if people keep using it, even if they all delete their information, so a large audience is a given.
Knowing an audience has two large pieces, identity (i.e. you're user X) and derived identity data, i.e. people interested in HN are interested in tech. The biggest use of all this data is associating users together. If all my data across all the internet was deleted immediately, I bet Google et. al would be able to uniquely identify me within a few days, they wouldn't know I'm the same person whose data was just deleted, but they'd know a wealth of targeting information about me again, and within a few years I'd bet they'd know me just as well as they do now.
My web usage is pretty routine, and humans in general are pretty routine, so I would expect it to generally hold that, without explicit effort to the contrary, we'd all be pretty easily re-identified (at least as much as advertisers are concerned) after deleting our information, and sure, I won't be searching for that exact search query because now my git-fu has improved, but I'm still going to be doing things that identify me as someone interested in and/or using git.
Facebook is going to keep all the derived data from people, and that data is going to allow them to very easily re-target anyone once they have a good feel for what their interests are. And I can't imagine a more transparent display of interests than activity on a social network, it's almost explicitly interest-bound.