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A comment on The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history. Parent comment

Re:The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of intern... by SCdF on Friday November 23, 2018 @05:45AM (#18515669)
That is a very nicely formatted response.

It--- at least to me--- proves my point that active user is not a useful metric, as all of those people have very different values and drive growth (or don't) in very different ways, and so have no use being clumped together.

We didn't even get to talk about differing user demographics or time, data by country, trends inside countries etc.

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Re:The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of intern... by mark212 on Friday November 23, 2018 @11:23AM (#18517337)
You could have made the same criticism about a magazine in 1965. They tout to advertisers how many “readers” they have and how readership is growing, and your criticism is “all I do is open it and flip through the pages; I don’t _read_.”

Your value is not in reading the articles but in viewing the ads. For FB display advertising, you opened the app and viewed ads. Eyeballs captured! Value unlocked! Sure they’d rather have you spend 5 hours on the site, but even your slight attention is valuable.

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Re:The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of intern... by TekMol on Friday November 23, 2018 @12:45PM (#18517856)
That's like saying 'pounds' is not a useful metric because it does not tell you 'pounds of what'.
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Re:The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of intern... by gaius on Friday November 23, 2018 @03:23PM (#18518697)
What weighs more, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?
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Re:The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of intern... by King-Aaron on Sunday November 25, 2018 @11:22PM (#18531055)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH0hikcwjIA
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