Greetings, all. A lot of our staff is off because of Easter, which is great. Happy Easter, everyone. We just don’t have a ton of blog writing time today because we’re covering the tasks that our holiday-observing colleagues normally take care of.
Who are we kidding? Turns out, things have become shockingly productive around here in the wake of 4chan getting hacked and shut down (for now). Nevertheless, we’re still rushed.
If you’re not aware, Earth briefly stopped spinning on Tuesday when the world’s greatest minds were unable to access their 4chan accounts. It wasn’t an outage. Hackers hacked it like hackers hack in hacking movies. They didn’t gain access with stolen passwords, phishing, or social engineering. It was a run-of-the-mill SQL injection (the go-to vulnerability in web applications for all kinds of reasons).
Other large, famous websites were in the news this week. A federal judge determined that Google violated antitrust laws by monopolizing two critical segments of the ad tech ecosystem: publisher ad servers and exchanges. There’s a lot to get into there, and we’ll probably circle back to that next week, but Meta also had problems this week and we find those more interesting.
There was a major development in the antitrust lawsuit that was filed against Meta during the first Trump administration. Government lawyers from the FTC are now arguing that Meta’s apps commandeer 85% of the average person’s mobile device screen time. Meta’s lawyers counter that the FTC’s calculations exclude YouTube and TikTok, and Meta’s apps only account for 30% of total screen time (“only”) when video-watching mobile apps get factored into the equation.
Our opinion is that we think it’s about time for Meta to get broken up. That’s the FTC’s ultimate goal– to turn Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram into separate companies. Our gripe is that Facebook has become an AI slop wasteland because it shares revenue with the creators of viral images. The man you see in the picture above this paragraph is a side hustle bro hero because Meta paid him $431 for posting an AI-generated image of a train made out of leaves. He now goes on podcast after podcast to explain how he did it.
Facebook is pushing AI agents pretty hard. No one outside of the company knows why. Not for sure, anyway. The best speculation we’ve seen is that generative AI can tailor very specific things that hold an individual’s attention. The sooner Facebook can determine what truly hooks someone, the sooner they can serve expensive ads to that person.
We’ll keep an eye on the lawsuits against Facebook and Google and update you accordingly. We need to wrap this up though.
This week’s first closing link is a Velvet Shark piece that is (actually) titled Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? Intriguing stuff. Next, on Tuesday, The Verge published an article about Chinese TikTok posts that target tariff-weary American shoppers. These videos claim that you can pay $10 for $165 Birkenstocks because the seller somehow acquires them from the factory that makes them and is ready to eliminate all middlemen. The catch that eludes most people is that the products are counterfeit. Birkenstocks are made in Germany, for example. You can watch one of these videos here. Finally, and practically, we’ve got a HubSpot post about lowering your CPAs (cost per acquisition).
That’s all for today. See you again next week.