Forbes’ list of the most valuable brands in the world in 2015 has Google at #3 and Facebook at #10. Other top ten brands are Coca Cola, McDonalds, Toyota, Samsung, and Apple. There’s a significant difference between Google and Facebook and the rest of the companies – the amount of time it would take people to formulate an answer if you asked them what the company sells.
Coke, fast food, cars, electronics, and iPhones are all easy answers. But what are they going to say for Google and Facebook? It’s not something we think about when we interact with them daily.
With a little help, most people could probably come up with the fact that Google and Facebook make the majority of their money from advertising. But it would take a little more thought to grasp the implications of Google and Facebook making all their money from advertising…
Of course, they get lots of page views, so ads seem worthwhile, but the ads are most valuable when they’re targeted. And to deliver targeted ads, advertisers need to know about you. Your likes, your interests, your location at any time during the day.
So a company, whose primary interest is to serve its shareholders (most often by making money), has all kinds of useful data about you. And it’s definitely useful, as illustrated by the study about Facebook and “intimate” data. They showed you can tell a great deal about a person with just a little information about a lot of other people.
Assume that Google and Facebook know everything about you – your interests, your relationships, what you’re passionate about, what makes you angry, how you spend weekends, what you do after work – because it’s not that far from the truth. Is that a bad thing?
Even if they’re selling that information to advertisers who then manipulate ads to increase their efficacy, the advertisers don’t care who John Smith is and why he spends so much time building model airplanes. And you don’t care because you have AdBlock and don’t even see the ads.
One danger is the information passing into the wrong hands, to someone who could use it maliciously. That is bad news, and it might be worth researching a company before passing a chunk of personal information to them to store, but you might justify the risk by assuming no one would ever want your data. You’ve got nothing to hide (second week in a row this has come up – might be worth addressing in further depth if it comes up again).
And you can’t really blame Google and Facebook. Without advertising revenue, they wouldn’t be able to provide you with their service. Well couldn’t they get money some other way? They could make you pay a monthly fee. Or pay for a premium account. Or sell a lot of sweatshirts. But it’s probably safe to assume they’ve considered those options and determined that advertising, while it sacrifices privacy to a certain degree, is the best way for them to make money.
If there was a paradigm shift in the way the public perceives Google and Facebook, and advertising was viewed as evil, it would make economic sense to ditch the ads and try out something else. But as long as we’re content to trade information for the use of a service, they’re content to work harder to give us ads we actually care about.
pat73hat 