Facebook’s Year in Review: Grading Its Progress on Three Big Questions – eMarketer

Its somewhat of a bright spot that Facebook Watch ranked higher than Sling TV or PlayStation Vue, which have been on the market longer (PlayStation Vue is shutting down in January, however), and only slightly lower than HBO's two streaming products.

But considering that Facebook Watch is freeas is IGTVthe lackluster uptake is still concerning heading into 2020.

Grade: D

As 2018 ended, we were curious how Facebook would tackle the growth of private sharing in social media. We expected it would focus more attention on its smaller, messaging-oriented properties such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and that it would shift its attention away from the News Feed and toward Stories. We also questioned whether the introduction of ads on WhatsApp would change the way users perceived the messaging app.

Here, the jury is still out on Facebooks progress. While Facebook is still heavily focused on Stories, there are no signs that its moving away from the News Feed. And WhatsApp didnt end up introducing ads this year; Status Ads are slated to appear in 2020.

The biggest news on this front was that in March 2019, the company announced a pledge to shift all of Facebooks apps toward private communications. The plan, as described by Zuckerberg, will be built around principles such as encryption, interoperability and secure data storage. But progress has been slow, and there are questions about whether encrypted messaging (which is what WhatsApp uses) is the right direction to go for Facebooks other apps, and about whether any of these moves will give users more privacy from Facebooks data gathering machine (not likely).

We suspect that the pivot toward private communication will take some time.

Grade: Since its too early to give a letter grade, well just give it a P for passing.

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Facebook's Year in Review: Grading Its Progress on Three Big Questions - eMarketer