A classic Silicon Valley tactic — losing money to crush rivals — comes in for scrutiny
Whenever a new online medium gains momentum — whether it’s photo-sharing (Instagram), messaging (WhatsApp), live video (Meerkat), ephemeral stories (Snapchat) or social audio (Clubhouse) — Facebook is sure to follow. So it was no surprise when the company announced last week a near-clone of Substack, the fast-growing newsletter platform that connects notable writers directly with subscribers.
But how, skeptics wondered, could Facebook — whose relationship with journalists is notoriously frayed — compete against a start-up that has built its reputation on catering to writers’ needs?
The answer, it turns out, is by offering them financial terms that Substack can’t match. Substack makes money by taking a 10 percent cut of writers’ revenue. Facebook’s cut of subscriptions on its newsletter platform, Bulletin, will be a tidy zero percent, at least for now. And it paid best-selling authors such as Malcolm Gladwell and Mitch Albom to sign on for the launch. “The goal here is to support millions of people doing creative work,” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told reporters.
Those familiar with Facebook’s track record could be forgiven for suspecting that the company is motivated by something more than altruism here. Bulletin may indeed be a useful tool for writers, many of whom will surely welcome the pressure on competitors to lower their fees. But it is also emblematic of a tactic that Facebook and other tech giants have often employed to quash competitors as they expand their business empires into new markets.
From Google Photos to Apple TV Plus to an Amazon subscription service that offered discount diapers, the world’s wealthiest companies routinely launch new products free or at money-losing costs that smaller rivals can’t manage without going out of business. Whether that’s an unfair business practice that merits antitrust scrutiny or just good old-fashioned competition depends on whom you ask — but the tide may be turning toward the former.
For decades, U.S. courts have taken a hands-off attitude toward what was once known as “predatory pricing,” partly on the theory that lower prices are good for consumers regardless of the motivation. If a company wants to take a loss on a product in hopes of gaining market share, the free-marketeer’s thinking goes, that’s its prerogative. A problem arises only if it later corners the market and raises prices — in which case, new competitors should spring up to force them back down anyway.
That laissez-faire approach has emboldened tech giants to wield free products and below-cost pricing freely as weapons in their quest to conquer new markets.
In 2009, when Amazon noticed an e-commerce upstart called Quidsi making inroads with a subscription business aimed at parents, Diapers.com, Amazon made a bid to buy it — while launching its own subscription service, Amazon Mom, that offered even steeper discounts. Documents later revealed as part of an antitrust investigation reportedly showed Amazon was willing to lose $200 million in a month on diapers alone to neutralize the threat Quidsi posed. Quidsi gave in and sold to Amazon in 2010. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
In 2015, Google launched Google Photos with the promise of unlimited, free storage and no ads — a money-losing proposition that no stand-alone photo-storage company could compete with. By the time Google started charging for storage in 2020, the innovative start-ups that once dotted the competitive landscape were mostly defunct.
When Apple launches new subscription products, such as Apple Music and Apple TV Plus, often with free or deeply discounted introductory offers, the company sometimes publicly acknowledges that its goal isn’t to make money on them, at least in the short term. Even so, the company benefits by enmeshing its software ecosystem ever more tightly with customers’ daily lives, so that they’ll keep buying iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches. Apple can afford to lose money on streaming music indefinitely; rival Spotify, whose primary business is streaming music, cannot.
Similarly, Facebook Bulletin could serve Facebook’s broader interests in numerous ways. It could give newsletter readers a reason to spend more time on its platform, where it can serve them ads. It can better target those ads based on the authors they subscribe to. And it can bolster Facebook’s payment platform, Facebook Pay, which will be the only way to pay for Bulletin newsletters at launch.
There’s no evidence that Facebook Bulletin in particular will raise antitrust flags. In fact, its launch came just a day after a federal judge tossed two major government antitrust lawsuits against the company, sending its stock soaring.
Still, the broader trend of tech giants using loss leaders to undermine upstarts may come under fresh scrutiny amid a wider societal rethinking of corporate power and the power of dominant tech companies in particular.
A big step in that direction came Thursday, at the first open meeting of antitrust crusader Lina Khan’s tenure as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC voted to revoke a 2015 policy statement that had constrained its role in regulating “unfair methods of competition.” While the commission said nothing about Facebook or other tech giants specifically, the move paves the way for it to go after those companies for practices that have long been tacitly permitted in the tech sector — potentially including pricing products below cost to undermine rivals.
That’s something Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director for the left-leaning think tank Open Markets, has been calling for. The charge of predatory pricing — selling goods at a loss to drive out competitors, presumably to raise them later — has gone out of fashion in antitrust law, where courts have adopted stringent tests that make it nigh-impossible to prove. Vaheesan says the FTC under Khan has an opportunity to revive it, perhaps even outright banning certain kinds of below-cost pricing by companies above a certain size or market share.
“We want companies to compete by making better products, investing in new equipment and tech — not purely relying on their financial advantages to capture market share,” Vaheesan said.
Vaheesan says such rules should apply not only to the largest Internet platforms but also to venture-backed insurgents seeking to disrupt established industries by running their businesses at a loss for a decade or more. He cited Uber and Lyft, the ride-hailing companies that have outcompeted taxi companies in part by charging people less money for a ride than it costs the companies to provide. Recently, Uber and Lyft have been hiking prices dramatically amid a shortage of drivers.
Sacrificing profit for growth is core to the Silicon Valley start-up model, and the “smaller rivals” that tech giants are trying to crush are often backed by deep-pocketed venture capitalists of their own. Substack, funded by the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, is no pushover.
Four antitrust experts who spoke with The Washington Post were divided on whether a product such as Facebook’s Bulletin is rightly viewed through the lens of predatory pricing (or, in this case, “predatory bidding,” since it’s the writers rather than consumers who are getting the too-good-to-be-true deal). There are valid business reasons for companies to offer low introductory rates on new products, and price wars in a competitive market can benefit consumers — or in the case of Bulletin, writers.
For consumers, there’s little to fear from Facebook’s entry into the market, at least in the short term. If anything, it could allow newsletter writers to offer subscriptions at slightly lower prices, since they don’t have to pay Facebook to use its platform. In the long run, however, they could still lose out if Facebook emerges as the dominant option, especially if they object to the social network’s privacy or data collection practices.
There’s no guarantee that will happen, of course. Facebook’s efforts to copy rivals have met with mixed results over the years, and Substack was quick to suggest that writers should be wary of putting their trust in the social networking giant. Asked for comment on Facebook Bulletin, Substack spokeswoman Lulu Cheng Meservey said, “The nice shiny rings from Sauron were also ‘free.’ ”
When looking at whether below-cost pricing harms competition, it matters who’s doing it, said Christopher Conlon, an economist at New York University who studies competition among companies. “If you started your own Substack clone and ran it as a nonprofit for journalists, you might be hailed as a hero,” he said. “If Facebook does it, I think folks are rightly suspicious.”
Today, we are releasing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0. As part of this release, we are highlighting changes below that we believe are relevant to parts of our developer community. These changes include announcements, product updates, and notifications on deprecations that we believe are relevant to your application(s)’ integration with our platform.
For a complete list of all changes and their details, please visit our changelog.
General Updates
Consolidation of Audience Location Status Options for Location Targeting
As previously announced in May 2023, we have consolidated Audience Location Status to our current default option of “People living in or recently in this location” when choosing the type of audience to reach within their Location Targeting selections. This update reflects a consolidation of other previously available options and removal of our “People traveling in this location” option.
We are making this change as part of our ongoing efforts to deliver more value to businesses, simplify our ads system, and streamline our targeting options in order to increase performance efficiency and remove options that have low usage.
This update will apply to new or duplicated campaigns. Existing campaigns created prior to launch will not be entered in this new experience unless they are in draft mode or duplicated.
Add “add_security_recommendation” and “code_expiration_minutes” to WA Message Templates API
Earlier this year, we released WhatsApp’s authentication solution which enabled creating and sending authentication templates with native buttons and preset authentication messages. With the release of Graph API v18, we’re making improvements to the retrieval of authentication templates, making the end-to-end authentication template process easier for BSPs and businesses.
With Graph API v18, BSPs and businesses can have better visibility into preset authentication message template content after creation. Specifically, payloads will return preset content configuration options, in addition to the text used by WhatsApp. This improvement can enable BSPs and businesses to build “edit” UIs for authentication templates that can be constructed on top of the API.
Note that errors may occur when upgrading to Graph API v18 if BSPs or businesses are taking the entire response from the GET request and providing it back to the POST request to update templates. To resolve, the body/header/footer text fields should be dropped before passing back into the API.
Re-launching dev docs and changelogs for creating Call Ads
- Facebook Reels Placement for Call Ads
Meta is releasing the ability to deliver Call Ads through the Facebook Reels platform. Call ads allow users to call businesses in the moment of consideration when they view an ad, and help businesses drive more complex discussions with interested users. This is an opportunity for businesses to advertise with call ads based on peoples’ real-time behavior on Facebook. Under the Ad set Level within Ads Manager, businesses can choose to add “Facebook Reels” Under the Placements section. - Re-Launching Call Ads via API
On September 12, 2023, we’re providing updated guidance on how to create Call Ads via the API. We are introducing documentation solely for Call Ads, so that 3P developers can more easily create Call Ads’ campaigns and know how to view insights about their ongoing call ad campaigns, including call-related metrics. In the future, we also plan to support Call Add-ons via our API platform. Developers should have access to the general permissions necessary to create general ads in order to create Call Ads via the API platform.Please refer to developer documentation for additional information.
Deprecations & Breaking Changes
Graph API changes for user granular permission feature
We are updating two graph API endpoints for WhatsAppBusinessAccount. These endpoints are as follows:
- Retrieve message templates associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
- Retrieve phone numbers associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
With v18, we are rolling out a new feature “user granular permission”. All existing users who are already added to WhatsAppBusinessAccount will be backfilled and will continue to have access (no impact).
The admin has the flexibility to change these permissions. If the admin changes the permission and removes access to view message templates or phone numbers for one of their users, that specific user will start getting an error message saying you do not have permission to view message templates or phone numbers on all versions v18 and older.
Deprecate legacy metrics naming for IG Media and User Insights
Starting on September 12, Instagram will remove duplicative and legacy, insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API in order to share a single source of metrics to our developers.
This new upgrade reduces any confusion as well as increases the reliability and quality of our reporting.
After 90 days of this launch (i.e. December 11, 2023), we will remove all these duplicative and legacy insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API on all versions in order to be more consistent with the Instagram app.
We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received from our developer community, and look forward to continuing to work together.
Please review the media insights and user insights developer documentation to learn more.
Deprecate all Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 endpoints
Facebook Wi-Fi was designed to improve the experience of connecting to Wi-Fi hotspots at businesses. It allowed a merchant’s customers to get free Wi-Fi simply by checking in on Facebook. It also allowed merchants to control who could use their Wi-Fi and for how long, and integrated with ads to enable targeting to customers who had used the merchant’s Wi-Fi. This product was deprecated on June 12, 2023. As the partner notice period has ended, all endpoints used by Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 have been deprecated and removed.
API Version Deprecations:
As part of Facebook’s versioning schedule for Graph API and Marketing API, please note the upcoming deprecations:
Graph API
- September 14, 2023: Graph API v11.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 8, 2024: Graph API v12.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- May 28, 2024: Graph API v13.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
Marketing API
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v14.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v15.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 06, 2024: Marketing API v16.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
To avoid disruption to your business, we recommend migrating all calls to the latest API version that launched today.
Facebook Platform SDK
As part of our 2-year deprecation schedule for Platform SDKs, please note the upcoming deprecations and sunsets:
- October 2023: Facebook Platform SDK v11.0 or below will be sunset
- February 2024: Facebook Platform SDK v12.0 or below will be sunset
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Before today (August 28, 2023), advertisers could not promote images and/or videos used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API. This process created unwanted friction for our partners and their customers.
After consistently hearing about this pain point from our developer community, we have removed this unwanted friction for advertisers and now allow users to seamlessly promote their image and/or video media used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API as of August 28, 2023.
We appreciate all the feedback received from our developer community, and hope to continue improving your experience.
Please review the developer documentation to learn more.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Launching second release of Facebook Reels API: An enterprise solution for desktop and web publishers
We’re excited to announce that the second release of FB Reels API is now publicly available for third-party developers. FB Reels API enables users of third-party platforms to share Reels directly to public Facebook Pages and the New Pages Experience.
FB Reels API has grown significantly since the first release in September 2022. The new version of the APIs now support custom thumbnails, automatic music tagging, tagging collaborators, longer format of reels and better error handling.
FB Reels API will also support scheduling and draft capability to allow creators to take advantage of tools provided either by Meta or by our partners. Based on the feedback we received from our partners, we’ll now provide additional audio insights via the Audio Recommendations API and reels performance metrics via the Insights API.
Our goal in the next couple of releases is to continue to make it easier for creators to develop quality content by adding features like early copyright detection and A/B testing. We’re also excited to start working on enhanced creation features like Video clipping- so stay tuned to hear more about those features in the future.
Call-to-Action
If you are a developer interested in integrating with the Facebook Reels API, please refer to the Developer Documents for more info.
Not sure if this product is for you? Check out our entire suite of sharing offerings.
Tune in to Product @scale event to learn more about FB Video APIs and hear from some of our customers.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
YouTube Announces AI-Enabled Editing Products for Video Creators
WhatsApp Passkey Support Reportedly Rolling Out to Beta Testers on Android: How It Works
Career stories: Influencing engineering growth at LinkedIn
Meta Urged Not to Roll Out End-to-end Encryption on Messenger, Instagram by UK
CCI Said to Have Appointed Former WhatsApp Executive, Government Officials as New Members
WhatsApp iPad Support Spotted in Testing on Latest iOS Beta, Improved Group Calls Interface on Android
Allowing Users to Promote Stories as Ads (via Marketing API)
Facebook Hashtags: Free Hashtag Tool + 70 Ideas
Enhancing homepage feed relevance by harnessing the power of large corpus sparse ID embeddings
![17-tips-for-writing-effective-youtube-descriptions-[free-tool]](https://www.social-ping.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/127190-17-tips-for-writing-effective-youtube-descriptions-free-tool-80x80.png)
17 Tips for Writing Effective YouTube Descriptions [Free Tool]
How to Boost Engagement With LinkedIn Carousel Posts and Ads
Enhancing Security and Developer Productivity: LinkedIn’s Journey with Implementing Content Security Policy
-
Uncategorized1 week ago3 Ways To Find Your Instagram Reels History
-
Uncategorized2 weeks agoSocial Media for Business: A Practical Guide
-
OTHER2 weeks agoWhatsApp Chat Interoperability Feature Spotted in Development on Latest Beta Update: Report
-
FACEBOOK1 week ago
Introducing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0
-
LINKEDIN1 week agoCareer Stories: Learning and growing through mentorship and community
-
OTHER2 weeks agoYouTube ‘Subscribe’ Button Spotted to Be Glowing When Creators Request Subscription
-
Uncategorized1 week agoCommunity Manager: Job Description & Key Responsibilities
-
Uncategorized7 days agoThe Complete Guide to Social Media Video Specs in 2023