Are social media apps/platforms really B2C? Aren't they more B2B?

They're fundamentally B2C because the hardest part is getting the consumer virality engine running. Once the consumers are there, the B2B part (eg the ads engine) is relatively easy. I won't say trivial, but I would guess literally 2-3 orders of magnitude easier if you have a large and engaged audience. B2C success is the rate-limiting step.

Agreed, the b2b part is simple. It's a lot of work, but it's something you can hire people to do and follow a playbook.

There's no playbook you can run to make a social app go viral.

> fundamentally B2C because the hardest part is getting the consumer virality engine running. Once the consumers are there, the B2B part (eg the ads engine) is relatively easy

Social media is neither. Ben Thompson's aggregator aside from the B2C/B dichotomy shines in this example. Snap and Twitter notoriously struggled with ad sales, for example.

How do the struggle so much? They have a large, engaged audience. Seems like it should be straight forward?

I think the struggle is people don't respond (convert) on those platforms for whatever reasons that are inherit to their audiences or the app itself. If users don't convert then businesses aren't going to spend on ads. I work in marketing and Twitter has always been hard to have any sort of positive return on. Big brands can afford that but the millions of smaller businesses can't.

Twitter was doing $5 bill pa of ad sales... Snap is doing over $4 bill pa. Twitter was sold for ~$40 bill, Snap is currently at $18 bill market cap.

That isn't notoriously struggling. The statement that the ad component is relatively easy is borne out by the facts. There are zero companies doing lots of ad revenue with very few users, and practically every service with hundreds of millions to billions of users spending their time looking at some service is doing significant ad revenue.

The only way one can think they struggled is if compared to the two wildly outlying, greatest ad revenue machines in the history of the world.

B2C to acquire the product (userbase), B2B to sell it

B2C is definitely a bigger technical challenge, B2B is a sales challenge.

B2C people expect perfection for free and will balk at the slightest complication.

Also consumers are very hard to monetize at scale whereas business will throw money at things that solve problems.