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70% of Meta engagement is unfollowed
The shift
At the start of the pandemic, TikTok was tiny and Meta's content was all shown from accounts people followed. The shift to recommended content also moved Meta from photo to video.
Meta was bringing in Reels, but the ads on them did not work at all yet, which opened a gap in revenue. At the same time, the company put a huge amount of money into the infrastructure for AI ranking.
The cost
The stock price fell hard, and the company made very large layoffs, some of them to undo hiring during the pandemic. It was a painful experience, more so for the people who were laid off.
Zuckerberg was pummeled for the spending, and he stood up and did it anyway. The majority of what Meta is today differs from what it was five and a half years ago.
How does recommended content differ from following?
In a following feed, the order comes from accounts a person chose to connect with. A recommendation feed instead ranks content from across the whole network by predicted interest, using signals such as how long someone watches. Douyin launched in China in 2016, and its international version TikTok merged with Musical.ly in August 2018.
Why does AI ranking need so much hardware?
A recommendation system has to choose from millions of possible items every time someone opens the app. A common design, described in a 2016 paper on YouTube's recommender by Paul Covington and colleagues, uses two stages: one model narrows millions of items to hundreds, and a heavier model scores those hundreds. Both stages run constantly for every user, on GPUs, which are chips originally built for graphics that run many calculations in parallel.
Why did Reels earn less than Feed at first?
Meta executives said in 2022 that Reels was monetizing at a lower rate than Feed and Stories. Full-screen vertical video meant advertisers had to adapt their creative and Meta had to build ad formats for it. Facebook went through the same gap with mobile in 2012, when mobile reached 23 percent of its ad revenue in the fourth quarter, up from almost nothing earlier in the year.
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