They probably did do the maths and conclude that the contributors who'll stick around are driving a significant part of the desired engagement. Dumb memes and culture war potshots and disinformation sure, but engagement.
If you have NNN million users, and you have full location tracking, purchase history, device ID, contacts, search history, list of other apps installed, usage data, Wifi SSIDs, Bluetooth beacons, etc. etc. etc. that's going to look like a huge payday compared to those same users running a mobile adblocker.
And if you're not currently collecting location tracking data, and you've got half a decade of meteoric growth, well, turn it on. Forecast that graph up and to the right, and just flip the switch to the "get money" position.
Due to the winner's curse, you only have to convince a few investors. Even if a significant fraction don't trust your prospectus and imagine that some users might be turned off by a post-IPO monetization scheme, you merely have to convince a small group that your numbers are accurate and you're TikTok 2.0.
Comments like this amaze me. People really think these giant corps are out here not doing things like this.
You should assume that any numbers shared publicly are just the tip of a giant-ass iceberg and that there were probably 10x more analyses going on internally that weren't shared.
The thing that ultimately gets shared publicly is whatever avoids using advanced stats or internal jargon; They want a single soundbite, not a scientific paper with a full methods section.
After a year with not much to show for it, the VP for the silo starts to put out kudos for the team for break-even revenue impact. However, behind the scenes, the insight they were taking credit for was a common sense idea that had already been in the e-commerce team’s backlog.
Nothing surprises me when a company says that they’ve run the numbers.
But... most businesses aren't that complex, and people can usually come up with really good common sense ideas for how to make improvements. Data-science is often most effective when it serves less as a visionary idea-maker and more as translator that helps common-sense ideas become real (optimizing the precise values used, figuring out the best roll-out strategies, building forecasts).
And yes comments like this amaze me too.
They might have chosen to ignore them. They might have fed biased assumptions into their calculations. Project management might have messed up and deprioritized the features meant to placate that section of the userbase. Institutional churn might have resulted in the corporation forgetting that they ever did run those numbers or why they are now heading down this path.
The business world runs at least as much on bullshit as the most cynical among us might think, I'd say. It's not half as clever or competently-run as one might hope, certainly.
It's a cliche that front-line workers have a better understanding of customers and products than the c-suite and that this leads to predictable blunders, because that's often true.
(I'm also not sure I'd call Reddit a "giant corp", but that's beside the point [EDIT] and anyway, to be fair, this particular discussion isn't just concerned with Reddit)
Their finance team probably made a projection that if they can get X% of current mobile web users onto the app, they’ll be able to extract Y% more total revenue. They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers and even if they had, they have absolutely no idea how to model their value, so they don’t, the board sees the numbers and tells them ‘ASAP’ and that’s how you kill social networks, because the financial model is based on false assumptions.