The article is based on… nothing? And a bit of TikTok mania? I thought this was really low quality in essence - providing no real proof for any substantial change.
My assumption is that Google and Facebook are pushing stories about how they're in a precarious position and actually have a lot of threatening competition, some of it dangerous, foreign, and in need of investigation.
Absolutely, although the risk for them is retaliation, especially with the US deciding that it wants to be the chief geopolitical chaos generator in the world.
Having US social media in your country is a huge geopolitical risk, especially if you're one of the regimes that isn't just doing what the US wants at all times.
I think we are seeing psychogical warfare occurring on any platform possible by many groups & governments. If we keep using technologies that refuse to adapt to strictly prevent this, rather than enable it, we are doomed. Metrics will always be gamed, and cat-and-mouse moderation makes this a losing game.
How would you even do that? Government controls mass communication by law, its privately operated with federal permission essentially (FCC). Government sets up the frameworks that media operates in. the best you an do is akin to zine printing with your little independent website. Once you go big you are subject to attack by the media if you go against elite business interests and vilification by the wider public who will never be exposed to nuance, then its over. The public narrative moves on to the next permitted discussion point and leaves you behind. I hate to be a cynic but this is what the history books suggest.
I think platforms and users need to be willing to sacrifice functions that can be abused. at least by default. Email and phone are both examples where enforcing allow-list communication at the protocol level could save them. Instead, both of these communication protocols are dying because they are now overflowing with scams and spams that are allowed to reach you instantly by default, with little to no distinction from legitimate communication. Something like Twitter probably should not exist in its current form.
That's power users probably using that, or people with fancy phones. You can tweak settings and use extentions to improve just about any user experience, but if the default experience is being abused and 90% of the userbase won't ever switch from that, it's a problem. As far as the insane regulatory mess I'm seeing spawn up, I think p2p systems are the way to tackle that.
> For Meta and Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet, the cyclical problem may not be the worst of it. They might once have hoped to offset the digital-ad pie’s slower growth by grabbing a larger slice of it. No longer. Although the two are together expected to rake in around $300bn in revenues this year, sales of their four biggest rivals in the West will amount to almost a quarter as much. If that does not sound like a lot, it is nevertheless giving the incumbents reason to worry. Five years ago most of those rivals were scarcely in the ad business at all (see chart).
- today: Google and FB have 75% of all sales combined and those other rivals have 25%
- 5 years ago: those other rivals had 0%
What does this say about the market share of FB and google 5 years ago? Nothing. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe it was 90%. Maybe it was 75%! But hey, whatever, let’s publish that clickbait article.
It's an article about potential competitive threats to Google-Meta, not a survey of the entire online advertising industry. The rise of potential competitors is not "nothing".
"Clickbait" can be used with a lot of publications. But in the list of publications it can be applied to... I'd say the Economist would be ranked about dead last. Maybe tied with Der Spiegel.
If I'm understanding baxtr's point, they're saying that the article is attempting to claim a trend without showing enough evidence to point to one. The fact that the competitors have gone from 0% to 25% within 5 years could be evidence that Google/Meta have growing threats, or it could be evidence that their competitors can't grab enough of the market to be sustainable so they die within 5 years, or that they're buying up all of the competition within 5 years of their launch. Google/Meta could have gone from 60% of the market to 75% of the market in the last five years.
So that's the case for the headline claim that they're "under attack" being linkbait. It isn't really affected by how you feel about the Economist's (or even less Der Spiegel's) brand.
The title is: “the ad duopoly is under attack”. The term duopoly describes how the market is split: two companies make up the biggest chunk. The article provides no evidence that the market structure has changed. See my comment.
A clickbait can be used by any publication. Apparently, including The Economist.
