Harvard Business Review:

“Without personalized ads,” [Facebook] says in its ads and on its website, “Facebook data shows that the average small business advertiser stands to see a cut of over 60% in their sales for every dollar they spend.”

Hmm. Really?

It’s an eye-popping figure, and one that suggests that Apple’s pro-privacy policy is poised to deal a devastating blow to small businesses. But where does the data for this apocalyptic claim come from? And does it hold up under scrutiny?

And:

To properly evaluate this claim, you first need to understand the popular metric that Facebook used here to quantify advertising success: return on ad spend, or ROAS. The metric indicates the amount of revenues associated with advertising — but it does not indicate the amount of revenues caused by advertising.

And:

In its campaign against Apple’s new policy, Facebook is claiming that when it compared the ROAS for campaigns that leveraged personalized information with campaigns that didn’t, it found that small businesses would suffer a 60% cut in revenues if they were deprived of personalized advertising.

That scary-sounding number, however, is almost certainly too high. Randomized controlled trials that compare personalized advertising with no advertising tend to reveal much smaller differences.

Follow the headline link for more of this takedown. I’d be quite happy with a much smaller version of Facebook that allowed me to keep in touch with friends and family without all the privacy busting. I’d even pay for the privilege so I stopped being the product.