How the Click Economy works

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kneeblock

kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
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This is what I've been studying the past several years and will likely continue to study. Understanding the click economy and how it impacts labor, advertising and even popular opinion is vital in this era of social media normalization.


View: https://youtu.be/oVfHeWTKjag
 
Robbie Hart

Robbie Hart

All Biden Voters Are Mindless Sheep
Feb 13, 2015
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Just watched a minute and my first thought was likes for people like shillary.....have to listen to the rest of it....
 
Greenbean

Greenbean

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This should be wider known, but I guess a fool and his money and all that.

Having advertised on facebook, this is not new to me, however I didn't know that an entire international industry makes money doing this.

It's really evident when you see competitors racking up the likes and showing no engagement. but advertising on facebook isn't a complete scam.

It definitely puts your business in front of more eyes. just like a billboard or commercial when you pay to sponsor an ad for a set amount of Time, it will show up on people's wall that otherwise would not know about you. so there's that.
 
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Leigh

Leigh

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Jan 26, 2015
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That was pretty fascinating. Been thinking about promoting through FB. This will make me think harder.
 
Greenbean

Greenbean

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Leigh said:
That was pretty fascinating. Been thinking about promoting through FB. This will make me think harder.
Click to expand...
it's not terrible, but it rarely translates into $$$. We boosted posts when we wanted people to know about promotions, and it helps keep your name on people's tongues, as well as brand recognition.

However, I wouldn't advise it as a sole method of advertisement. A business Facebook page to me is more or less an illusion for the customer to make your company look legit and that other people are flocking to your product, when they may or may not be.

You sort of need a fb page to be taken seriously. I'm still blown away by a pizza restaurant that we order from that doesn't have a webpage where you can view their menu. It doesn't change the product, but it definitely changes the publics perception
 
kneeblock

kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
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Here's an interesting article about how distressed both marketers and publishers are over the click econony. The article talks about how revenues are down as advertisers are committing less and/or impressions are decreasing. Marketers say they want to move away from impressions and toward ads that make you spend time with them or get you on a page that gives their product more exposure.

What does this mean? More annoying lengthy inescapable ads and user experience that weaves advertising more seamlessly into the content.

What’s Really Killing Digital Media: The Tyranny Of The Impression
 
kneeblock

kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
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And what's more, our data comes cheap. In aggregate, companies are making millions if not billions on us, but individually, we're mostly worth pennies, largely because market forces have made our data much more valuable in bulk incentivizing the harvesting of as much of it as possible by any means necessary.

Here you can see how much your privacy is worth on the auction block.

How much is your personal data worth? - FT.com
 
kneeblock

kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
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Here finally are some alternative proposals and advocacy points.

First is Web 2.0 and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier's ideas on micro-payments, which have their flaws, but are interesting free market premises that kind of feed into the same idea as state based redistributive systems like Universal basic income.

Jaron Lanier wants to build a new middle class on micropayments

Here are some proposals by academic and coiner of the term "net neutrality" Tim Wu on why Facebook either should be a pay service or should be paying us.

Facebook Should Pay All of Us - The New Yorker

Here is the fairly basic "do not track" opt-in list which is similar to the "do not call" list that made the world breathe a bit easier.

Do Not Track - Universal Web Tracking Opt Out


Here's the Fair Adblock extension which allows some ads to get through to you from trusted companies, but not 3rd part buyers. I know it works with Chrome, not sure about others.

Stands

But none of this stops Macedonian kids from posting memes or mechanical turk enabled pseudo accounts from creating false brand sentiment. That takes more substantive policy advocacy than just opting out or demanding more of a share in the benefits.

What I'd like to see is a rating system for monetized content as easy to recognize as the R rating of a film. That way we'd at least be informed about what was stealth paid content and what was likely shipping our personal data off to servers around the world. Being able to better differentiate that content with either a modified URL or a large rating watermark would likely change our relationship to information for the better. The question is whether such a system would need to come through legislation or through internal industry reform.

An ad monetized web isn't all bad, of course, as it does allow for free use of services, which by and large consumers seem to want. To me, the modest goal of better labeling is a way to stoke more conversation about how we use these tools and how we guarantee trustworthy information in the network society.
 
Splinty

Splinty

Shake 'em off
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Kneeblock said:
First is Web 2.0 and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier's ideas on micro-payments, which have their flaws, but are interesting free market premises that kind of feed into the same idea as state based redistributive systems like Universal basic income.

Jaron Lanier wants to build a new middle class on micropayments

Here are some proposals by academic and coiner of the term "net neutrality" Tim Wu on why Facebook either should be a pay service or should be paying us.
Click to expand...

I've got some reading to do, but the modern focus on "nudging" this and creating a competing market force...rather than banning, is hugely impressive to me.

I really am amazed that this is the response, as it acknowledges the benefits while simply looking to inject a fair force for the market to adapt as it will in unknown ways.
 
Splinty

Splinty

Shake 'em off
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Dec 31, 2014
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kneeblock @Kneeblock

Please keep flooding this thread. I will read every single link this week. I feel like you're dissecting something I knew existed, but hadn't really parsed enough to consider problems and solutions
 
kneeblock

kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
12,435
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Splint said:
kneeblock @Kneeblock

Please keep flooding this thread. I will read every single link this week. I feel like you're dissecting something I knew existed, but hadn't really parsed enough to consider problems and solutions
Click to expand...
Will do. One of the things I appreciate most about this site from you and Wild @Wild is your decision to keep this site generally ad free and to have a clear no data sharing policy in our Constitution. It makes this one of the few places on the web where it's possible to have peace of mind.
 
Left Hook Larry

Left Hook Larry

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Jan 14, 2015
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Facebook has high quality traffic with amazing targeting options. They also optimize your ads to get you the cheapest price for your goal. Best advertising platform out there right now imo. Buying likes and all that junk is just a small chunk of the FB economy.
 
kneeblock

kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
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I'm going to mention a few more in depth resources at the end of this post that get into these topics in more depth because there aren't really condensed links that do it justice.

Beyond the fairly easy to understand concept of data reselling and targeted advertising based on likes, there are two other trends at work in the corporate surveillance system that the web runs on.

Audience segmentation
Sentiment analysis

Audience segmentation is the process whereby data miners and advertisers divide users whose information they've collected into the categories that define who you are worth receiving ads from. Ever wonder why you seldom see ads for a new Benz, a Rolex or even a MacBook pro? It's because your browsing habits or social media likes have been used to construct a persona that has a modest income and generally prefers cheaper things. You, like nearly everyone else online, are in several sortable databases with your age, income, family size, gender and race. In many cases your name or contact information is right next to all of this information, though in some it's the idea of you more than tying the data directly to your name. Either way, you're still getting the ads and you're still being profiled.

Sentiment analysis is more of a corporate strategy for dealing with aggregate information. It's a data mining process where companies track people's emotions or perceptions of a brand across the web. Any content searchable on this forum or anything indexed on Google can be used in this analysis. Twitter is perhaps the richest treasure trove for this technique. So for example my typing Downy wrinkle releaser is amazingly life changing because it means I never have to iron probably means a bot will flag this post and group it into a database. If this site sold user data, Downy could match me as a user to the post with barely any effort and then start sending me ads. Most of this is accomplished through machine learning where AI combs the web and make generalizations about both the user and the product based on determination of positive or negative or sometimes a word cloud of sentiments. But there are still companies out there who use actual people to do this work, employing full time in house people to search twitter and google all day for mention of the product and then reply with positive spin. In many cases, this labor is outsourced.

More on segmentation, including its origins and the way it manifests online.

Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age (MIT Press): Joseph Turow: 9780262701211: Amazon.com: Books

A more technical read on sentiment analysis. Worth skimming for some of the ideas that inform how it works if not reading in its entirety.

Sentiment analysis algorithms and applications: A survey
 
kneeblock

kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
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And, of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the reason the NSA was so easily able to assemble such a massive apparatus to spy on the world was because the data was sitting right there waiting for them to scoop it up. As Edward Snowden and others have explained, the government essentially deputized many social media and messaging companies to do their snooping for them by compelling them to share these massive targeted datasets with them. In some cases, they just outright hacked the data using intercept techniques authorized under the Patriot Act.

Owing to the fact that this forum has a variety of international users, you can be sure some of the messaging traffic is getting scooped up even as we type, though its thankfully anonymized and would require a formal request from the government to the site owners to get identificatory information on a user or group of users (which they would be legally disallowed from telling us about).

Facebook, Apple, Twitter and other platforms (perhaps after performing a sentiment analysis) made a great show of claiming to keep our data safe and striking a tone of non-compliance, but only after legislative change was imminent. They had been quietly providing the data for years in most cases, but absolutely didn't want people stopping to say "hey, why do they have all this stuff anyway?" Blaming government overreach and striking a public adversarial posture was a slick PR move, and one easily engineered fresh off the victory over net neutrality that painted Big Tech as somehow on the side of the little guy. It would still take most of them a couple years to standardize end to end encryption in the messaging components of their services.

But the story of the government surveillance programs wasn't just how uncomfortable it made people that the state was using this information. That private sector actors were storing and freely sharing amongst themselves so much of our personal data is just as disquieting.
 
kneeblock

kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
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Here's a decent analysis of how this click economy actually impacts the production of content online. There is discussion of last year's $100 million sale of content farm ViralNova and how it represents a shift in what kind of content is most valuable in the network society. It also contains some recommendations for how Facebook in particular could make some changes to mitigate this trend.

The $100 Million Content Farm That's Killing the Internet
 
kneeblock

kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
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Wanted to pop in and add the work of the writer who has most influenced my thoughts on the digital economy, Dr. Tiziana Terranova.

In 2000, long before we had experienced the growth of social media or indeed web 2.0 she noticed the trend toward free labor prevalent in the digital economy and how it would ultimately lead to user behavior becoming the primary source of value.

http://web.mit.edu/schock/www/docs/18.2terranova.pdf

The article is sort of dense, so I wouldn't begrudge you if you opted for the wiki instead.

Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy - AcaWiki
 
kneeblock

kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
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Fascinating article on how the Trump campaign somewhat brilliantly used sentiment analysis to help win the election.

Definitely the most interesting policy takeaway:

"On Monday, after a similar announcement from Google, Facebook said it would no longer allow fake-news websites to show ads, on their own sites, from Facebook’s ad network — a half-step that neither blocks what appears on your newsfeed nor affects how advertisers can microtarget users on the social network."

The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz
 
kneeblock

kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
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