Facebook May Be Getting Rid Of FBX, Social Media's First Ad Exchange
Facebook initially struggled with the shift to mobile and investors punished the stock immediately after the IPO. The stock languished for almost a year before taking off as they pivoted and shifted their focus to mobile, but it seems they
have been relatively slow in fully embracing the change while the market was quick to reward them with the stock slightly below all-time highs. I know this is a marketing class, but I’m a finance guy and I can’t help but think about the market impact of their
strategy shift, especially because it was so impressive how quickly the market moved.
FB was slow to shutter this exchange, but it highlights the fact that the landscape is shifting and the dust is far from settled. I can understand the natural hesitation to change and maybe Facebook, as well as the industry, underestimated
the shift to mobile. Or maybe it was less clear how they would monetize it, “Unfortunately for ad exchanges that specialize in retargeting, cookies don't work on mobile. As Digiday points out, to overcome this, Facebook has been touting its Custom Audiences
product, which uses a smartphone's unique identification number to allow advertisers to retarget people who have used their mobile apps.” It would like be difficult to convince clients to spend on ads if they couldn’t be targeted, so maybe it was simply a
matter of figuring out how to adapt the model to mobile platforms. I don’t really know the history here, so it’s difficult for me to say how this has evolved and I’d be happy to hear from anyone that has insight on this subject.
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