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Your cynical take would make sense if you think Apple would somehow get that 30% if Facebook were allowed to collect this data. Apple gets nothing either way.

Apple isn't holding Facebook hostage, it's simply allow FB users to relinquish giving Facebook their usage patterns for free.



Facebook might pivot towards other monetization strategies when their cross-platform web tracking ads don't work anymore.

For example, Facebook offers you to pay to "increase the reach" of your posts. This happens for example when you try to post a message to a Facebook group. If you want to make sure all members see the message, you have to pay.

This is a way that Facebook monetizes without tracking (targeting is based on people who opted in to join a group) and the users pay directly in the app (allowing Apple to get their 30% for the in-app payment).

With Apples changes, Facebook (and others) might focus more on strategies like that.


> For example, Facebook offers you to pay to "increase the reach" of your posts. This happens for example when you try to post a message to a Facebook group. If you want to make sure all members see the message, you have to pay.

That actually sounds incredibly cynical, and criminal

Edit: Would the person who downvoted me within literally a minute of posting this please explain why?


I didn’t downvote you, but perhaps it’s because you didn’t back up the word “criminal” with a source. What law does it break if facebook doesn’t send your post to everyone in the group?

If you wanted to send a letter to all of your friends in the traditional post, you’d have to pay 58 cents per person to do so, the business model hardly seems unusual.


I thought the same thing when I found out about that, but it kinda makes sense.

Facebook tries to show you the most "interesting" posts. If you are a member of many groups, there are probably too many posts in your groups to show all of them in your newsfeed. So Facebook just picks whatever they think is interesting.

Or the poster can pay to have everyone see the post.

Anyway, I prefer this monetisation strategy to creepy tracking.


That actually does make sense in a newsfeed way. I had this mental image of a person physically reading the group (being in the group specifically) and just not seeing any posts by x because x didn't pay to play




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