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Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity

Facebook as the only means of discovery for small businesses

A couple of weeks ago we explored a counterpoint to the narrative that Facebook is being disingenuous by protesting Apple’s increased privacy controls in iOS 14. In summary, that the internet has evolved to a point where Facebook ads are an important, affordable means of discovery for small businesses.

A few days ago one of the co-founders of the Morning Brew newsletter reiterated that:

Morning Brew is one of my favourite newsletters and one of most popular ones, with over two and a half million subscribers and having recently been sold to Business Insider for dozens of millions of dollars. If they owe their scale to Facebook ads, then they are the poster child for the success of this ad platform.

Now. This site’s spoken often of wresting back control from Facebook’s pervasive, opaque tracking; I also think Apple’s right in its endeavour to protect people from such tracking by default.

My position on this has little to do with Facebook’s pirported hypocrisy or culpability. I think it’s a collective failure that there are no scalable alternatives for discovery on the Internet other than Google and Facebook (and Instagram and maybe soon Whatsapp), both roughly twenty-year-old companies.