They provide a popular, free service in exchange for marketing data and an advertising platform. They definitely need to clean things up, and the video view issue was bad, but overall it’s a very inexpensive ad platform with highly effective targeting that other businesses use to grow their business. Many businesses do far better there than on other platforms. Far from “useless.”
With any free service you use, you're not the customer, you’re the product.
They’ve cracked down big time on anything remotely political - you now need to give them a crapton of personal information if you want to do it and it all needs to be verified. Even, for example, for something like a PSA type ad reminding people to vote.
ATM they're having "problems" - service down for a lot of people.
And with Google and Android, you are also the product.
I have no idea of their inexpensive advertising costs versus Google Ad words. I see they are being sued for issues with accuracy.
I got ripped off years ago with Overture pre merger one month for $6,000. All were in phony clicks I fought off, syndicated without my approval and what a mess and never trusted these PPC again. Another instant with the Indian Click farm problem I got ripped off from too when it first occured, so well aware of fake advertising spends. So, sadly this was over 14 years ago and one would expect better checks and balances and really shows how inept another newer, faster, “smarter” and competing platform remains less intelligent.
As you know, I am not a fan because of many things like they should never have allowed scandal after scandal to occur, be apolitical, and protect their users, which they have not and sold users data and really have been mismanaged. Zuckerberg is no Bezos or Gates. Sure, they copied a platform like Classmates and did it better than GeoCities and MySpace, thats all I can say.
And it isn’t free to everyone, those smart people who value their privacy don’t use it. There are a lot of us out there. I find the entire thing very low value added as a service/product other than mostly a billion person scrapbook of narcissism and photo database. The whatsapp merger created a way for them without your permission to secretly mine all your phone data even though you never had a facebook account installed, really is intrusive.
If you look at the actual business and its stock pricing and what they “create” as far as product development, there is no close comparison at all to their “peer” tech stocks with huge investments in R&D like Apple, Google, Amazon. All of the other FANG’s require much more investment in management, brain power, hardware, etc.
