Cory Doctorow

And we're such dedicated craftspeople that we're going to fund a whole building full of anti-fraud engineers, and they're going to do nothing except try and block ad fraud.

So when you give us a dollar to show an ad to a kind of user, we're going to find that user and stuff the ad in their face.

So advertisers pile in, publishers pile in.

They're told, you know, remember we told these suckers we weren't going to show them things they hadn't asked to see.

We will show them your stuff if you put it on Facebook.

Just put up an excerpt and a link and we'll cram it into their eyeballs.

And so they pile in and they get locked in too.

It's very hard to leave once that user base is a significant part of your business.

They become structurally important.

And so now Facebook starts to turn the screws on them and publishers find that they have to put longer and longer excerpts on the platform.

Eventually, it's just the whole article.

If you want to get shown to your own subscribers, much less recommended to a user who hasn't subscribed to you yet.

And if you put a link back to your own website, they won't show it to anyone because that might be a, quote, malicious link.

Advertisers see prices go way up.

They see ad targeting fidelity go through the floor.

Ad fraud explodes.

When Procter & Gamble in 2017 zeroed out its surveillance advertising budget with the platforms called programmatic advertising, they saw a 0% drop in sales because all $200 million was just disappearing down the fraud hole.

So the publishers and advertisers are getting a bad beat.

But so are we.

The amount of stuff in our feed that we've asked to see has dwindled to almost nothing.