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night of the living bathroom

art tag is #dedusdraws


arborelia
@arborelia

I know some people are reading cohost's latest financial post as "cohost is doomed", perhaps because they've never seen anyone be honest about the finances of a website before. It sounds to me that the site is not as doomed as every other social media website is, but it definitely does need our support.

Social media costs a lot of money, and people use it for free, so in general that doesn't add up. For a while there was one profitable social media site, and it was Facebook, and the source of their profits was video ad fraud. Once that became a bit too clear, they did a half-assed pivot to cryptocurrency and then to VR and they're back to losing gobs of money I don't know finances of enormous companies are confusing. In general, an era of bonkers free money from VCs is ending and it's hitting every service we use.

This site has a plan for sustainable social media that doesn't involve fraud, and it's not an easy plan, but part of the plan is that they're building a site people like to use that the users can pay for.

Please, if you're able, buy a Cohost Plus subscription. I love this site and it's the only social media site where I feel at home right now. I think there is a world where it's a sustainable website, and more people subscribing to Cohost Plus would be a big part of it becoming sustainable.


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in reply to @arborelia's post:

Facebook makes money! Not as much as their investors might want, but selling targeted ads is a pretty good business if you can scoop up enough data to do it well. There are only about three companies that know enough about people to do it though: Facebook, Google, and (though they mostly don't use this beyond the app store, app store ads are a decent business!) Apple. Everyone else can't target well so they make way less on their ads.

Huh. I'm frankly surprised because I thought that they were somewhat dependent on miscounting video impressions and very dependent on Apple letting them track phone users, and then, didn't they lose a bazillion dollars in value in trying to create the Metaverse?

Does the general way that ads work on Facebook still make enough money to offset all that?

Yeah, ads in the app still make a lot of money for them. Apple's privacy changes and other stuff have just been chipping away at the edge. So it's bad from a wall street line must go up perspective, and they've made some bad bets lately (hiring an absolute ton of people during the pandemic tech boom, bad metaverse ideas) but the money machine is still intact. It's just not something anyone can do.

they're nowhere near going into the red, but their revenue has plateaued and started to drop, and absolutely no one thinks they have a way to bring it back up. so they're going from "innovative, growing tech giant" to "stable, slowly declining tech giant with no further prospects for growth", and investor interest in them is gonna plummet

cutting back on the wild overspending should keep them stable for quite a while, since their revenue decline so far is fairly small. but the wild overspending was a gamble that they'd be able to create entirely new markets and get the massive growth going again