People, not products

The signs would seem to indicate that we are seeing the start of a transition between business models based on segmented advertising and other alternatives based on different philosophies that are more to do with the product or a more humanist approach.

To Apple’s clear emphasis on guarantees of privacy when handling health-related information, or its “We’re not Google, we make a living from selling products, not our customers’ information,” which was made clear at its September 9 presentation, we can now add a new social network idea, Ello, which also defines itself by what it isn’t: in this case Facebook, by saying: “We are not like them.” For the moment only available in closed beta, if you manage to enter the site, the appearance is that of a ghost town, Ello is based on the idea that users are people, not simply targets that advertisers are waiting to characterize on the basis of their movements, like lab rats stuck in a maze and whose activities were simply a pretext to administer them segmented advertising.

Think about it: Facebook and Google are companies whose products we may like more or less, but whose business model is based entirely on studying your behavior: what you search for, where you are, with whom you normally talk, what makes you click on something, what factors will make you stay longer or comment… in the final analysis, you’re stuck in a Petri dish, being looked at under a microscope, subjected to experiments to manipulate your mood, and all with the goal of finding the right advertisement to put before your eyes.

It may not sound like a valid model, but it might be more interesting than the previous approach, which consisted of martyring us with a continuous display of offers, products, and services, the vast majority of which were of no interest, and not exactly a celebration of humanism. Many observers are now beginning to see that exploiting user information is degrading, and that it simply converts us into moving targets permanently under scrutiny in the hope of achieving that perfect hit with the silver bullet that establishes passive buying behavior.

Apple’s is a well-worn path: we make things, we sell them, and obviously, we would like you to buy more things from us, but not on the basis of gathering information about you that we sell on to others, but instead on the basis that our products are good. The model that is increasingly being questioned tries to offer you the best possible products at competitive prices, because you are no longer the buyer of these products, but are instead the user that gives us information, making you a target, an advertising bull’seye.

The idea of a social network not controlled by advertisers and where what we do is not collected and processed as part of a data bank used to hassle us with clinical efficiency certainly sounds attractive. But the 64,000 dollar question is how such a model would finance itself if the aim is not to charge advertisers for segmented access to users, who in turn are not paying for the service.

For the moment that question seems to have been left unanswered, perhaps until we see the market’s reception to yet another social network in a sector that with the exception of a very few countries, is dominated by one player.

We are not products and don’t want to be, but what’s the alternative? Somebody has to pay for the privilege of no longer being a product and instead returning to being people.

(En español, aquí)