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Meta's Audacious New Plan: A Platform Without Ads
Will Zuck's rumoured European plans go global?
Tod Maffin
September 01, 2023
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In This Issue:
🌍 Meta considers ad-free versions for European users
🎙 Podcast ad spend and listenership rise despite market contractions
📱 TikTok releases Effect House from beta, enhancing AR capabilities for creators
🛡 Meta introduces opt-out controls for users to exclude data from AI training
🤖 Meanwhile, X updates plans to use public data for AI training with no opt-out
Meta Ponders an Ad-Free European Experience
One of the world’s largest ad platforms is considering going ad-free — and that company is Meta.
The New York Times reporting this morning that Meta is considering going ad-free in Europe for people who pay a subscription fee.
This, of course, is less about altruism and more about trying to stay on the right side of European privacy legislation.
It would be optional, of course, and Meta would continue to offer free versions of Facebook and Instagram with ads.
There’s no information on how much the subscriptions would cost or when they would roll out.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the report.
In July, the E.U.’s highest court effectively barred Meta from combining data collected about users across its platforms — including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — as well as from outside websites and apps, unless it received explicit consent from users.
In January, the company was also fined 390 million euros by Irish regulators for forcing users to accept personalized ads as a condition of using Facebook.
🧑🏻⚖️ The Regulations So Far
In the last couple of weeks, a new E.U. law forced social apps to offer non-personalized content feeds. Some platforms also stopped letting advertisers target people under 18 years old.
Next year, another law will force the hands of Apple — requiring them to let Europeans download apps from app stores other than Apple’s own.
The complicated legal landscape there is why Meta still does not operate its new Threads app in Europe.
Meta’s CFO recently said that advertising in the region made up 10% of the company’s overall ad business.
Podcast Growth Defies Bubble-Burst Fears
The podcast advertising space is regaining its footing, after a handful of large players — like Spotify, Paramount, and NPR — recently cut back on their audio investments.
The cutbacks didn’t happen because of shrinking ad investment — far from it, in fact. No, the main reason was because many of these networks over-bought content during the pandemic, making what seemed like a good decision at the time look bloated in todays’s economy.
During the podcast boom of the past few years, leading publishers [were] investing significantly in several high-profile, star-driven studios and creators that did not materialize and generate the return they were expecting.
This has led to publishers being more conservative and selective when considering content alignment and strategic partnerships.
💵 Marketers Are Still Spending
All that said, ad budgets are still flowing to podcasts.
Almost 6 out of 10 agencies and advertisers currently have ads running in podcasts. That’s up from just over 3 in 10 three years ago.
Almost a third say they’re consider spending on podcast ads in the next six months — Digiday reports that’s a nine-year high.
In the U.S., MediaRadar says podcast ad spending increased 5% year over year.
That number was 10% year over year on comedy podcasts
And 26% on crime podcasts
🏢 Big Networks Getting Most of the Money
Marketers do seem to be a little more choosy in which providers they use.
Betches Media says most of the spend is going to large networks like Audacy.com or iHeart.com, as opposed to small or independent producers.
A recent YouGov study found that in the U.S. podcast listenership is up from 46% two years ago to 56% this year.
More than a fifth of Americans listen to podcasts more than five hours per week.
TikTok's AR House Exits Beta for Creators
TikTok’s augmented reality software, Effect House, has now come out of beta. This tool lets brands create their own AR effects for the app.
Other platforms have their own versions of this:
Snapchat calls theirs Lens Studio
Meta’s is called the Spark AR platform
Effect House is pretty easy to use and comes with a bunch of templates you can adapt.
They also have a Discord you can get help from — there are about 400,000 people in there.
TikTok says effects made by the tool have been behind 21 billion videos.
Snapchat has long been the leader in this respect, with virtually every AR trend of the past decade stemming from Snap.
But TikTok’s popularity also sees it well-placed to become the originator of similar hits, which is no doubt a key lure of its Effect House offering.
Meta Offers Data Opt-Out for AI Training
It seems like the last couple of months there were as many stories about keeping your information away from generative AI scrapers as there were about the technology itself.
Now, Meta is offering a way to keep your information out of its model training.
The company has a web form that will let you “delete any personal information from third parties used for generative AI.”
That form’s URL is facebook.com/help/contact/1266025207620918
It’s a fairly basic form — just wants to know your country, name, and email address. I filled it out two days ago and got an email a few hours later confirming that I filled the form out, and nothing since then. So I don’t know if my data’s been scrubbed or nothing’s happened or they lost it or what.
It’s also possible — and call me a conspiracy theorist on this; I don’t care — that the only countries Meta is actually acting on this form data are European countries, given the legislation there. The optics of only offering privacy tools to one region aren’t great, so maybe the form is up for everyone, but they’re not doing anything if you’re not in Europe? I don’t know.
Do you plan to opt-out of Meta using your data for its AI models? |
X Will Collect Your Data Regardless
Meanwhile, X — formerly Twitter — has updated its privacy policy to say it will use your brand’s content to train its AI models. Not just brands, of course, but all accounts.
And, we can only assume, not just X’s models, but also those of Elon Musk’s AI company called, of course, xAI.
Here’s Techcrunch talking about the fellow who discovered the policy update:
This leads him to theorize that Musk likely intends to use X as a source of data for xAI.
And perhaps Musk’s recent tweet encouraging journalists to write on X was even an attempt to generate more interesting and useful data to feed into the AI models.
In fact, Musk has previously stated that xAI would use “public tweets” to train its AI models, so this is not much of a leap.
He accused other tech giants of leveraging Twitter to train their AI models, even threatening Microsoft with a potential lawsuit for alleged illegal use of Twitter data.
There does not appear to be any kind of opt-out form.
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