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Early in the afternoon today, 4th of October, I opened Instagram and it showed that there are some connections errors. Later in a while, I was told that not only Instagram but also Facebook and WhatsApp are not available for use. After searching online, some news related to the whistleblower – Frances Haugen popped up. 

Frances Haugen, who was a product manager at Facebook, who took an interview on the 3rd of October, said that Facebook chose to optimize its own profit instead of the public good (Horwitz, 2021). She also said that Facebook was tearing society apart with enormous bad things in it such as hate speech and misinformation (Pelley, 2021). According to Yahoo finance (2021), On the first of October, the stock price of Facebook was $343,01, on the 4th, the stock price went down to $326,23.

Previously, there were also some Facebook scandals. For example, it is reported that Facebook collected information from up to 87 million people and other companies can also access to personal data of Facebook users (Sanders, 2019). According to estimation, Facebook has 1,9 billion daily active users on average, with growth of 6,89% year over year (Dean, 2021). Hence, thanks to the enormous amount of users who use Facebook, Facebook can benefit from the network effect, which means that from the perspective of advertisers, Facebook becomes more valuable when there are more people using it and Facebook gains large amounts of profit from advertisers. In 2020, 84,2 billion dollars of revenue was generated from the worldwide advertising of Facebook (Statista, 2021). However, there are always some discussions about whether Facebook monetizes the data collected from users by directly selling them. In fact, Facebook does not sell data, it sells access to users by doing things such as putting an advertisement in users’ News Feed (Wagner, 2018).

The news of Frances Haugen reveals a new scandal of Facebook and also brings us concerns: How should we deal with the tech giants or social media platforms with their increasing influence on society? Perhaps by imposing more strict censorship? Then what about the freedom of speech? Or by posting more regulations for the usage of data? There are many things that need to be considered. And we will first see how Facebook will act on this scandal.

References

Dean, B. (2021). How Many People Use Facebook In 2021? [online] Backlinko. Available at: https://backlinko.com/facebook-users.

finance.yahoo.com. (2021). Facebook, Inc. (FB) Stock Historical Prices & Data – Yahoo Finance. [online] Available at: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FB/history?p=FB.

Horwitz, J. (2021). The Facebook Whistleblower, Frances Haugen, Says She Wants to Fix the Company, Not Harm It. Wall Street Journal. [online] 3 Oct. Available at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-says-she-wants-to-fix-the-company-not-harm-it-11633304122 [Accessed 4 Oct. 2021].

Pelley, S. (2021). Whistleblower: Facebook is misleading the public on progress against hate speech, violence, misinformation. [online] www.cbsnews.com. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-misinformation-public-60-minutes-2021-10-03/.

Sanders, J. (2019). Facebook data privacy scandal: A cheat sheet. [online] TechRepublic. Available at: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/facebook-data-privacy-scandal-a-cheat-sheet/.

Statista. (2021). Facebook ad revenue 2009-2020. [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/271258/facebooks-advertising-revenue-worldwide/.

Wagner, K. (2018). Facebook ads: This is how the company uses your data for targeting. [online] Vox. Available at: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17177842/facebook-advertising-ads-explained-mark-zuckerberg.

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In September, the Apple event was held, in which Apple introduced some new features of Apple fitness+ and announced that later in this year, Apple fitness+ will be available in more countries such as Italy, Brazil, Spain and Switzerland (Rossignol, 2021).

According to Apple, Apple fitness+ is the first service built around Apple watch, which also brings studio-style workouts to other Apple products such as iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV (Apple Newsroom, 2021). It is known there is a number of people who pay for Apple services such as Apple Music. In 2020, Apple started a new idea which is providing a bundle of services called Apple One (Perlow, 2020). Apple One enables people to have access to six services, namely Apple Music,  Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, iCloud+, Apple News+ and Apple fitness+ by just one subscription of the Premier plan. There are also two other options, the individual plan and the family plan, which provide Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade and iCloud + with 50GB and 200GB respectively (Apple, n.d.). 

In this case, we can see that Apple uses the bundling strategy for the services it provided. Bundling has several benefits. For instance, it can help companies to increase revenue and brings simplicity to customers by narrowing the wide range of product or service selections for customers, which can also reduce customer’s pressure to make decisions (Zix, 2020). In April 2021, Apple has 660 million subscribers, which are the major drivers of the growing revenue in Q2(Potuck, 2021). It is assumed that the release of Apple One contributes to a larger number of subscribers and boosts the revenue growth of Apple. 

The example of Apple One may indicate that bundling is a good strategy for companies that have a wide range of products and it can create simplicity for customers by saving them from making decisions.

References

Apple Newsroom. (2021). Apple Fitness+ expands availability; adds new workouts and guided Meditation. [online] Available at: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/09/apple-fitness-plus-expands-availability-adds-new-workouts-and-guided-meditation/.

Apple. (n.d.). Apple One. [online] Available at: https://www.apple.com/apple-one/.

Perlow, J. (2020). Apple One free with every iPhone? A services strategy to destroy Android. [online] ZDNet. Available at: https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-one-free-with-your-iphone-the-services-strategy-to-destroy-android/.

Potuck, M. (2021). Apple services hit 660 million subscribers with revenue growing 27%. [online] 9to5Mac. Available at: https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/28/apple-services-hit-660-million-subscribers/.

Rossignol, J. (2021). Apple Fitness+ Launching in 15 New Countries Later This Year. [online] MacRumors. Available at: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/09/14/apple-fitness-launching-in-15-new-countries/.

Zix (2020). 6 Benefits of Bundling Services. [online] MSSP Alert. Available at: https://www.msspalert.com/cybersecurity-guests/6-benefits-bundling/.