{"id":26,"date":"2021-06-29T11:15:37","date_gmt":"2021-06-29T15:15:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iterudio.com\/?p=26"},"modified":"2021-06-29T11:15:37","modified_gmt":"2021-06-29T15:15:37","slug":"competing-with-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iterudio.com\/?p=26","title":{"rendered":"Competing with Facebook"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>A federal Judge recently dismissed &#8220;anti-competitive&#8221;\/monopoly charges against Facebook<br \/> <br \/>The problem is that just being a very popular platform doesn&#8217;t make you a monopoly &#8211; e.g. Walmart is not a monopoly simply because a lot of people shop there and they are hard to compete against<br \/>FB allows people to easily connect with each other and share information &#8211; which is not monopolistic in any form.<br \/>from a business standpoint FB is selling access to those peoples information. SO FB isn&#8217;t doing anything different (from a legal standpoint) than what a popular tv network does &#8211; which again is functionally &#8220;build an audience&#8221; and then sell advertising to that audience.<br \/><\/p>\n\n\n<p>Google and Facebook allow &#8220;targeted advertising&#8221; &#8211; which ends up being very cost effective for &#8220;business users&#8221;<br \/><\/p>\n\n\n<p>BUT if you are a &#8220;content producer&#8221; you need to remember that FB is not your friend or partner. The wise content producer is NOT going to use FB as their primary platform<br \/><\/p>\n\n\n<p>i.e. FB is a great platform to acquire\/build an audience (at a price) &#8211; but then the first step for the &#8220;wise FB business user&#8221; should be to connect with that audience OUTSIDE of FB &#8211; after all FB can cut off your access to THEIR platform as they wish.<br \/><\/p>\n\n\n<p>from an &#8220;anti-trust&#8221; issue FB (probably) isn&#8217;t a &#8220;monopoly&#8221; &#8211; as in they are not actively being &#8220;anti competitive&#8221; &#8212; their moderation is questionable, and they are obviously biased and they might be engaging in &#8220;illegal discrimination&#8221; &#8211; but that is a different legal argument &#8230;<br \/><\/p>\n\n\n<p>btw: how you &#8220;successfully compete with FB&#8221; is similar to &#8220;how a small retailer successfully competes with Walmart (or Amazon)&#8221; &#8211; step 1 is to understand that you (probably) aren&#8217;t in the same business<br \/><\/p>\n\n\n<p>Walmart is a logistics company that specializes in &#8220;low costs&#8221; &#8211; the &#8220;core business&#8221; for Amazon is (probably) &#8220;I.T. services&#8221; (in the form of AWS), but they are also a logistics company<br \/><\/p>\n\n\n<p>While the local hardware store is in the business of &#8220;selling service&#8221; &#8211; which means &#8220;individual attention&#8221; and\/or &#8220;high level of customer interaction.&#8221; &#8230; sure that local hardware store charges a little more, but they are nice to deal with<br \/><\/p>\n\n\n<p>Remember FB is not selling a unique product &#8211; they are selling access to an &#8220;audience.&#8221; FB provides services to that audience BUT the &#8220;audience&#8221; is the product not FB<br \/><\/p>\n\n\n<p>Quick how does &#8220;local newspaper&#8221; compete with the NY TImes? well, NOT by trying to do better national news coverage &#8211; &#8220;local newspaper&#8221; needs to concentrate on having &#8220;local news&#8221; &#8211; and a lot of pictures of &#8220;local people&#8221; doing &#8220;local stuff&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n<p><br \/>oh, and WHEN something better comes along &#8211; users can leave FB with minimal effort. Of course Mr Zuckerberg et al realize all of the above and that is why they make an effort to make people &#8220;FB dependent&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A federal Judge recently dismissed &#8220;anti-competitive&#8221;\/monopoly charges against Facebook The problem is that just being a very popular platform doesn&#8217;t make you a monopoly &#8211; e.g. Walmart is not a monopoly simply because a lot of people shop there and they are hard to compete againstFB allows people to easily connect with each other and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iterudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iterudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iterudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iterudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iterudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.iterudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iterudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iterudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iterudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}