Has the consumer become the consumed?

The lines between traditional and modern forms of advertising, Growth Hacking, sponsored content, native advertising, have increasingly blurred with the digitalisation of the human experience. The end result in all this is that we, the user (or “consumer”), have become a saleable commodity within ourselves.

The way modern, digital companies are monetizing their various sites is to sell impressions as a means of determining the elusive, ethereal notions of “engagement” and “reach”. Whilst these factors may be measurable, based on the amount of people reached with a post, it is much harder to correlate these to cold, hard sales figures.

Take, for instance, BuzzFeed. Their generally harmless, sometimes-silly content has become ubiquitous across social media accounts worldwide. Their recent $50-million-dollar investment is proof enough that there is big business in videos of cats and people trying different countries’ cuisines for the first time.

However, don’t be mistaken, they are as ruthless and calculating as any other corporation. Big data and analytics help devise the perfect content to go viral; their approach is scientific and guaranteed to succeed. Algorithms ensure the optimum diffusion of their content, which comes in the form of software called “Pound”, or “Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion”.

With such heavy investment comes questions of monetization. Monetization, in this instant, typically comes in the form of sponsored content, PPC or PPI opportunities for advertisements. Our online actions are being sold to businesses as an impression, which are a valuable commodity in the world of vanity metrics.

These new-fangled means of internet engagement are only able to succeed through methods that are hard-to-quantify in terms of ROI but can easily impress potential advertisers like reach and engagement. Thus, we may think we are using a product ourselves, but really we are the product being sold to a third-party company who wishes to have their advertisements reach us.

This isn’t a new story; think of the adverts you are exposed to while watching television or reading a newspaper. The difference here is that all of our online behaviour is trackable so companies can devise the perfect content to engage with as wide or narrow a segment of the population as they wish.

In many ways, these sorts of websites know the content you want to read or watch better than you know yourself. The endgame of this may be some sort of doomsday scenario in a weird dystopian future where BuzzFeed knows what you want before you do, maybe they already do.