> They don't make anywhere close to $10 a month selling ads to a user.
This is somewhat incorrect. In Europe (which this is about), Facebook's average revenue per user is about $70 per year (~$6/mo), and in the US it's around $232 (~$19/mo). Taking into account the additional overhead of collecting payments from individual users, support, etc., it's definitely not orders of magnitude away.
I guess I was wrong about that. I remember reading years ago how shockingly little revenue targeted ads actually generate per user, but that must have changed. Also curious why FB is making 3x as much per user in the US vs Europe.
GDP with PPP compensated is on par or better in NW Europe and for all of the EU it's about 70% of the USA (which has about 100m more people than the USA). You'd expect it to be a lot closer.
Yes it is most likely to be less but not a factor of 3 simply based on purchasing power alone.
I'm sure it's not the only factor but it's surely one. Here in Spain we really make a lot less than in NW Europe. central and eastern Europe are even worse off.
Do you mean US advertisers are paying three times more to FB than the advertisers in the EU?
Please don't confuse things. FB users aren't FB's customers. FB doesn't get any money directly from the (on average just a little bit) richer US users.
I'd guess it's a combination of three things: GDPR reducing the effectiveness of targeted ads, the online advertising industry being more mature/established in the US, and Europe being generally more fragmented, reducing the size of ad campaigns.
"Shockingly little revenue targeted ads generate per user" is also relative to the context. I bang on these numbers a lot on HN because for many of us here, the amount of damage Facebook does to our lives, the amount of ads it shoves in our face, and the way it has contorted an entire industry into surveillance capitalism, is way, way more than $20/month worth of damage to our lives, culture, and society. It is also a good way to counter the frequently-proposed "what if the companies share ad revenue with their users?", which along with being sort of a "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" problem if you really analyze what that entails, has the even more fatal problem that there really isn't any money to do that with. If we cut you in for 50% of the ads you see in a month, you might be looking at a whopping $15-20 a month, or, pretty close to a single hour at what is roughly the de facto minimum wage. Even if we ignore how that instantly pushes all these companies from megaprofitable behemoths to bleeding money out of every orifice, $15-20/month isn't enough to make a compelling story on that front.
I think a lot of people have a mental model based on the size of these companies that they must be making hundreds of dollars a month per user, and it's good to run the numbers to show they don't so society can make more reasonable plans.
Also important to remember this is _average_ revenue per user. Consider that the cohort of users that are more likely to pay the monthly subscription are probably more valuable ad targets (more disposable income to spend online)
What is HN opinion on the practice to one day you show a popup to your user with new terms, you either accept or you leave , no way to enter and export your data or contacts. It is kind of shitty IMO all this ToS that are always updating, even with paid products you are forced into accepting the ToS or get fcked
Average revenue per user is $70/year in the EU and $230 in the US. But how much of that is profit? How to costs compare between serving a user ads and serving an ad-free user?
Server costs for images, text, and the occasional video can't be that high per user at Facebook's scale of billions.
But costs for the Rube Goldberg machine of ad hosting, recommendations, bidding, and serving? There's a whole lot of backend infra and middleware behind that. We should assume, at the very least, that ad-free users are cheaper for Facebook (unless they go through all of the backend recommendation processes for all users but simply hide ads from ad-free users). I assume that with some optimization ad-free users ought to be significantly cheaper to serve.
The backend cost per user is going to be about the same for a user anywhere in the world. So we can set an upper bound on the cost at the level of revenue per user in the market that generated the least revenue per user. That's going to scale with GDP per capita, so I feel safe saying that there are many markets where they get less than $10 per user per year, and therefore their marginal cost per user is less than that.
If they hadn't spent so much time, you would have noticed. That's the point.
Adding features and capabilities to a without making it more complicated for users who only use a fraction of them ("chat and huddle app"), is part of why this is so complicated.
> If they hadn't spent so much time, you would have noticed. That's the point.
I get that idea ... been a software engineer for quite some time now. Users will quickly let you know how much they don't like it when you change things. It also means I should easily be able to answer all of my own questions, and shouldn't be surprised by the level of effort required.
I guess it comes down to the basic cost/benefit analysis, and if the answer is "redesign", doing what needs to be done while trying limit any downside. That would include your users asking why everything just changed. I don't enjoy reading messages written in all capital letters either, where it seems those 10 exclamation marks are required to clarify how much you dislike it.
Anyway, from here, based on that alone ... seems successful. Back to work and Slack messages.
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According to public sources Tesla has raised 'only' 60.5m before delivering the first roadsters in February 2008. Though that total increased to 100.5m by the summer of that year. But I get your point.
Always looking for talented developers or designers with experience in Svelte or data visualization.
Datawrapper is a data visualization tool for journalists & other publishers. Used by NYT, Washington Post, AP, and many others. You’ve likely seen a Datawrapper visualization before - election results, Covid numbers, maps on world events, etc. are created using Datawrapper. We reach >200 million unique monthly visualisation viewers with a team of just over 20 people. Bootstrapped, profitable since day 1.
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(Not OP) The kind of regressions I'd think of would be things like:
- updating the URL state when someone clicks on a button
- proper back-button support in the browser that takes me back to the prior 'page'
- being able to navigate to any URL deep in your app and get a valid response (ideally rendered server-side so there's no client-side loading delay).
Things like these are hard, and the reason why it's common advice to use a framework and not hand roll. If you hand roll but don't support these things gracefully, you're making a case for not hand rolling.
True. One needs to build it's own "router" if you will. But in practice that means writing functions that modify the URL (some pushState(url) and scrollTo(top) stuff) and make them part of the primary function, so you can forget about it (I'm a functional programmer). Same with adding/substracting from the history stack. 1h of work each. Is that too much?
It really just worked without much troubleshooting. Most trouble I've had was with cookies and cross-origin problems (or weird client requests).
The most interesting part of this is probably Salesforce taking such an aggressive marketing position by calling it 'SlackGPT', when the 'GPT'-suffix is currently strongly associated with OpenAI.
Particularly ironic since Slack doesn't seem to be launching any type of GPT-like model as part of this announcements, it appears just to be a rebranding of a bunch of APIs Slack already has, with the enterprise software marketing dress-up as a revolutionary AI productivity boost.
That shouldn't matter in this case. If the brand is created / owned by OpenAI, Slack shouldn't be able to use it just because it's more convenient for them.
Otherwise I can just create HackerNewsSlack. It's a chat system with plugins, but doesn't have anything to do with Slack.
It's also explicitly against OpenAI's branding guidelines and will potentially infringe on the GPT trademark if that gets approved. I would have expected Salesforce to be conservative about that considering they're more dependent on OpenAI than OpenAI is on them.
The macrotrends list of net income by year below the charts is correct. The trailing 12 month chart at the top you may have been looking at is not a chart of annual net income.
Data visualisation tool for journalists & other publishers. Used by NYT, Washington Post, AP, and many others. You’ve likely seen a Datawrapper visualization before - election results, Covid numbers, maps on world events, etc. are created using Datawrapper. We reach >200 million unique monthly visualisation viewers with a team of just over 20 people. Bootstrapped, profitable since day 1.
Stack is NodeJS backend with Svelte frontend and D3/Svelte visualizations.
This is somewhat incorrect. In Europe (which this is about), Facebook's average revenue per user is about $70 per year (~$6/mo), and in the US it's around $232 (~$19/mo). Taking into account the additional overhead of collecting payments from individual users, support, etc., it's definitely not orders of magnitude away.
All data from Meta's last annual report: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/e574646...