"Your ad was shown to 2 people" but it was 1 person. Multiple that by however many haven't linked their accounts, and FB is charging you^W advertisers twice to show the ad to the same person.

TFA: >If only a small percentage of your target audience has linked their accounts, when you run Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns, you'll (falsely) see that you're reaching double the number of "people" (i.e. accounts). After all, Facebook will count that one person as two, if your ad shows both on Facebook and Instagram.

It’s a way to goose the numbers to make it look like more people saw an ad than really did. This type of tactic is usually employed when a company is facing a real decline in users/views, so they start coming up with “creative” ways to make numbers look better than they really are.

The cause is likely not money or goodwill: it’s legal privacy rulings. GDPR and the FCO ruling [1] have made it so cross-platform data (like the IG-FB data here to guess if two ad spend users are the same) isn’t allowed without explicit consent. My guess is that’s what’s driving this.

[1]. https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/7/18215143/facebook-whatsapp...

This is the right answer. Matching user data without consent is becoming fairly risky from a data regulation standpoint, as well as user perception.

yep, its because of the FCO ruling. The other thing I think everyone spouting money are missing is that FB would much rather be able to use the link between your FB and IG accounts to better serve you up ads based on that combined data.

I'll give you a hint: it starts with an M and rhymes with 'honey'.

Mummy..? I don't see what Egyptology has to do with this conversation.

I was thinking Mahoney. I can see the reasoning from FB, like why should all of FB’s products be counted as one view? If the same person goes to FB then YouTube, the advertiser should need to pay FB and YouTube. The same is true for Instagram.

We can’t shit on everything FB does.

Mummy doesn't rhyme with honey

It does in my accent?

"m" doesn't rhyme with "n" though, what accent is yours? I'd say money rhymes with honey but not mummy.

It may have went like this:

1. Facebook believed that the best thing for users was to have one account and identity across all services 2. Users expressed that they thought this was terrible 3. Facebook reconsidered, now thinks it's best to support accounts that aren't linked

It would be wise to stop believing what corporations say. They tend to lie.

Do you really believe that Facebook doesn't know if someone has multiple accounts if they failed to seek out a Facebook setting to link them together? This is the same Facebook that lifts data from people's phones even if they opt out of giving them that data.

> What's the real motivation behind this Facebook update?

Money