Zucked. Roger McNamee

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СКАЧАТЬ fans to interact with us on Facebook and to use our website as a content archive. Many others did the same, helping to cement Facebook’s position as the social hub of the web. Embracing Facebook worked really well for Moonalice, and our page eventually gathered more than 420,000 followers.

      Not surprisingly, there was a catch. Every year or so, Facebook would adjust the algorithm to reduce organic reach. The company made its money from advertising, and having convinced millions of organizations to set up shop on the platform, Facebook held all the cards. The biggest beneficiaries of organic reach had no choice but to buy ads to maintain their overall reach. They had invested too much time and had established too much brand equity on Facebook to abandon the platform. Organic reach declined in fits and starts until it finally bottomed at about 1 percent or less. Fortunately, Facebook would periodically introduce a new product—the Facebook Live video service, for example—and give those new products greater organic reach to persuade people like us to use them. We signed up for Facebook Live on the first day it was available and streamed a concert that same day. The reach was fantastic. Facebook Live and Moonalice were made for each other. I streamed one set of the very first concert by Dead & Company, a spin-off from the Grateful Dead, and so many people watched it that the band saw a surge in ticket sales for other dates on the tour. As a result, one of the band’s managers invited me to stream their next show from the stage.

      At the time of the IPO, targeting options for Facebook ads were limited to demographic information from activity on the site, things like age, sex, and location, as well as interests and relationships. The introduction of Open Graph and News Feed ads in 2012 set the stage for much better targeting, which improved rapidly when Facebook integrated “off-site” data into the suite available to advertisers. If Moonalice wanted to promote a concert, we would target demographic data—say, people over twenty-one in the city where our gig was—and then filter that audience with interests, like “concerts,” “Beatles,” and “hippie.” We would spend perhaps one hundred dollars to promote a show on Facebook. We would get a few thousand “impressions,” which in theory meant users who saw the ad. The nature of News Feed is such that users race past a lot of posts. To capture attention, we switched from promoting Events—which is what Facebook called our concerts—to creating posts that included a rich graphic element, such as a poster. In doing so, we ran afoul of the 20 percent rule. As it was explained to me by a senior Facebook executive, Zuck had decided that too much text made ads boring, so he set an arbitrary limit of 20 percent text. Our posters are works of art, but many of them violated the 20 percent rule because rock posters sometimes integrate lots of text into the art. Facebook would reject those ads, so I learned to superimpose a little bit of text onto attention-grabbing photos to create compelling images that would comply with Facebook’s rules.

      Moonalice is not a sophisticated advertiser, but we were not alone in that regard. Facebook enabled millions of organizations with small budgets to reach audiences for a fraction of the cost of print, radio, or TV advertisements. But Facebook recognized that the really big money would come from attracting the advertisers who had historically spent giant budgets on traditional media. Such advertisers had completely different expectations. They expected to reach large, targeted audiences at a reasonable cost with complete transparency, which is to say they wanted proof that their messages reached their intended audiences. At the time of the IPO, Facebook could not meet those expectations consistently. In 2013, Facebook began experimenting with data from user activity outside Facebook. They created tools for advertisers to exploit that data. The tools enabled Facebook advertisers the ability to target audiences whose emotions were being triggered in predictable ways.

      Facebook’s culture matched its advertising challenge perfectly. A company that prided itself on its software hacking roots perfected a new model to monetize its success. Growth hacking applies the intensely focused, iterative model of software hacking to the problem of increasing user count, time on site, and revenue. It works only when a company has a successful product and a form of monetization that can benefit from tinkering, but for the right kind of company, growth hacking can be transformational. Obsessive focus on metrics is a central feature of growth hacking, so it really matters that you pick the correct metrics.

      From late 2012 to 2017, Facebook perfected growth hacking. The company experimented constantly with algorithms, new data types, and small changes in design, measuring everything. Every action a user took gave Facebook a better understanding of that user—and of that user’s friends—enabling the company to make tiny improvements in the “user experience” every day, which is to say they got better at manipulating the attention of users. The goal of growth hacking is to generate more revenue and profits, and at Facebook those metrics blocked out all other considerations. In the world of growth hacking, users are a metric, not people. It is unlikely that civic responsibility ever came up in Facebook’s internal conversations about growth hacking. Once the company started applying user data from outside the platform, there was no turning back. The data from outside Facebook transformed targeting inside Facebook. Additional data improved it more, giving Facebook an incentive to gather data anywhere it could be gathered. The algorithms looked for and found unexpected correlations in the data that could be monetized effectively. Before long, Facebook’s surveillance capabilities rivaled those of an intelligence agency.

      To deliver better targeting, Facebook introduced new tools for advertisers. Relative to the 2016 election, the two most important may have been Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences. As described in Facebook’s Advertiser Help Center, a Custom Audience is “a type of audience you can create made up of your existing customers. You can target ads to the audience you’ve created on Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network,” the last of which is “a network of publisher-owned apps and sites where you can show your ads” outside the Facebook platform. Introduced in 2013, Custom Audiences had two very important forms of value to advertisers: first, advertisers could build an ad campaign around known customers, and second, a Custom Audience could be used to create a Lookalike Audience, which finds other Facebook users who share characteristics with the Custom Audience. Lookalike scales without limit, so advertisers have the option to find every user on Facebook with a given set of characteristics. You could start with as few as one hundred people, but the larger the Custom Audience, the better the Lookalike will be. Facebook recommends using a Custom Audience between one thousand and fifty thousand.

      Thanks to growth hacking, Facebook made continuous improvements in its advertising tools, as well as growing its audience, increasing time on site, and gathering astonishing amounts of data. Progress against these metrics translated into explosive revenue growth. From one billion users at year-end 2012, Facebook grew to 1.2 billion in 2013, 1.4 billion in 2014, 1.6 billion in 2015, nearly 1.9 billion in 2016, 2.1 billion in 2017, 2.3 billion in 2018, and 2.4 billion in late 2019. From just more than $5 billion in sales in the IPO year of 2012, Facebook grew to $7.8 billion in 2013, $12.5 billion in 2014, $17.9 billion in 2015, $27.6 billion in 2016, $40.7 billion in 2017, and $55.8 billion in 2018. There were issues along the way. Advertisers complained about the lack of transparency relative to advertising, and Facebook has been sued for inflating some metrics, including ad views and video views. But Facebook had become a juggernaut. The customers that advertisers needed to reach were on Facebook. This gave Facebook enormous leverage. When advertisers complained, Facebook could get away with apologies and marginal fixes. With its customary laser focus on a handful of metrics, Facebook did not devote any energy to questioning its decisions. If there was any soul searching about the morality of intense surveillance and the manipulation of user attention, or about protecting users against unintended consequences, I have been able to find no evidence of it. If Zuck and the Facebook team noticed that usage of Facebook differed materially from their ideal, they showed no concern. If anyone noticed the increasingly extreme behavior inside some Facebook Groups, no one took action. The Russians exploited this to sow dissention among Americans and Western Europeans, beginning in 2014. When The Guardian newspaper in the UK broke the story in December 2015 that Cambridge Analytica had misappropriated profiles from at least fifty million Facebook users, it precipitated an intense but brief scandal. Facebook apologized and made Cambridge Analytica sign a piece of paper, certifying that it had destroyed the data set, but then quickly returned to business as usual. While always СКАЧАТЬ