In 2021, Meta found that by reducing the relative amount of ads some groups saw by 80 percent, it only saw about a 3 percent increase of a usage metric. This shows ads aren’t a major cost for consumers, Hegeman says, because if a company like Apple lowered the price of its iPhone by 80 percent, it would likely see much more than a 3 percent increase in sales.
In response to regulations in the EU, Meta began offering an ad-free version of its products there for 6 Euros a month. But that offering hasn’t caught on, Hegeman says — just about 0.007 percent of users opted to pay for the service.
Meta found when it tested a new system to customize how many ads it shows based on how much a user likes or dislikes them, users didn’t seem to know the difference. The time they spent on the platforms and engaged on it didn’t change much. “This change had a minimal impact on people’s experience and was not very noticeable,” Hegeman says.
The FTC is asking Meta about Apple’s 2021 App Tracking Transparency policy that let users decide whether to let developers track their activity off-app to help serve more persoanlized ads. Meta warned investors in 2022 that it would result in a $10 billion revenue hit to its business that year. That’s presumably because when users are given an option to give Facebook and Instagram less data, at least a significant chunk of them take it. We don’t know exactly how many, though, since the judge sealed the courtroom to discuss internal metrics like how many people opted into the tracking.
That’s theme of the FTC’s questioning of Meta’s CRO. The FTC’s Stephen Pearson is asking about what Meta says it collects in its privacy policy, and points out that if Instagram were independent, it would have its own policy. Meta uses this data to fuel personalized advertising, which makes money for the company. Pearson is also beginning to touch on ad load — or the relative amount of ads to organic posts users see in their feed — which the FTC has tried to show Meta can increase with relatively little risk of losing users.
John Hegeman, the top executive in charge of monetizing Facebook and Instagram, just took the stand. He previously led product management for the Facebook feed.
What users say they want and what they show they want through their actions can be two different things. Cobb illustrates this point with the example of chronological feeds. While users repeatedly report this as a feature they’d like, Cobb says every time the company has tested it, satisfaction with the app declines and users’ engagement changes.
But that dip soon recovered, Cobb testifies. He’s referencing the sweeping content moderation and fact-checking policy changes CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in January just ahead of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, which answered a Republican wish-list.
Dips in how users feel about Meta’s brand are often correlated to media coverage — not necessarily actual changes to the product, Meta research executive Curtiss Cobb testifies on cross-examination. The FTC had tried to frame the fact that users don’t leave the apps in droves after reporting feeling worse about Meta’s brand shows they’re locked in due to Meta’s alleged monopoly. Meta is trying to complicate this picture, by showing that just because users feel worse about the brand after a specific media event doesn’t mean that its products are getting any worse — and that might be reason enough to stay.
Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) removed a provision from a budget package that would have stripped antitrust enforcement authority from the consumer protection agency and transferred it over to the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. The language appeared in an earlier version of the package and has long been on Republicans’ wishlist. President Donald Trump has fired the panel’s two Democratic minority commissioners shortly before the agency went to court over its lawsuit against Meta’s alleged social media monopoly.