Meta's Threads and Personalized Ads Response
Meta's Threads and Personalized Ads Response
Thoughts on two topics today:
1) Threads declining usage time and DAU
2) Personalized Ads under attack in Europe
Threads
Threads usage time is declining. The Threads team still doesn’t seem to understand that shoving influencers and random people onto the Threads feed is a suboptimal strategy.
The short version as to why the current execution is not working:
The primary purpose of Instagram’s social graph is positive reinforcement
The way to continue this on Threads is to aggressively show posts of people they are already connected to from Instagram
This gives an immediate reinforced dopamine hit from a previous pattern
Instead the average person is getting less engagement than they do on Instagram
As a result stop opening the app for anything other to see if it changed
Instagram influencers can have lots of followers because they are physically attractive
This does not mean that they on average are capable of writing anything interesting that people who don’t know them want to read
Instagram users follow accounts for inspiration for specific topics
None of this is reflected in Threads right now
The highest value part of Instagram are the normal women that use the app to keep in touch with their friends
Instagram is effectively repeating Clubhouse’s mistakes
Pushing everyone to follow famous people
People want to see who they want to follow
They instead see. a random pile of illiterate garbage written by strangers they don’t care about
From SimilarWeb estimates with usage time in seconds:
SensorTower, another company that tracks app usage, also reports that traffic to Threads appears to be waning. The company told CNBC that the number of daily active users to the Twitter rival was down about 20% from Saturday. Time spent had also decreased by 50%.
The findings suggest users were willing to sign up and check out Threads, but are less interested in sticking around.
Influencers will naturally follow where there is an audience. There is no need prioritize them whatsoever. If anything, they should be aggressively hidden so people get get consistent dopamine hits from seeing lots of likes as their first experience.
Otherwise, we will see this declining usage pattern that I predicted in my last article.
Personalized Ads
Norway is fining Meta roughly $100,000 a day for having personalized ads. The solution to this for Meta is simple.
Increase the number of ads that Norwegians see
Give notices to all Norwegian users that they are seeing more ads to make up for lost revenue
Remove personalized ads options for Norwegian businesses and inform them they will be paying X% more for similar results because of the actions of their government
European bureaucrats have deluded their citizens into believing that they can add privacy measures as a cash grab with no trade offs. The people of these countries need to receive the direct consequences of their politician’s actions.
If they still support it, then fine. See a lot more ads than normal and have your businesses be less competitive relative to countries that allow personalized ads.
This pervasive belief that personalized ads are bad exists because consumers do not understand the benefit of personalized ads. Namely, they mean less ads as a result of higher performance. They need to experience it directly.
The attack on personalized ads is a result of lack of consumer education. This education comes from showing the consumers directly cause and effect to non-personalized ads.