Monetizing… us.
Your digital footprint is the new regrettable partner from last night you wish you’d never slept with.
Is no secret that everything we do nowadays is being recorded. China is just an extreme example, but recording all we do actually makes all the sense in the world, since most of the amazing services making our lives better, connecting and augmenting us are free.
There is a lot of recent talking about how the solution is to have companies such as Google, Facebook or Instagram charge us in exchange of the wonders they provide us with. Doing this would enable them to stop relying on ads in order to monetize us, their users. See, we are not the customers of the Facebooks and Googles out there, advertisers are. We are the cattle, the content we so happily consume is our pasture, advertisers are the meat buyers and yeah, in this raw analogy, Facebook is the slaughter house.
With all the hype after the Cambridge Analytica scandal I downloaded my own Facebook data the other day and was going through it. I turned out to be represented by a flimsy total of 150MB worth of bytes on a hard drive. Think about it, in Steve Jobs’ jargon that would be something like 30 songs?
Monetization of Cattle
Suppose you run a magazine. You distribute it for free because if you were to charge for it, your readership would go to hell. You understand who your readers are and what matters to them, so you approach companies who might be interested in pushing products onto them. You provide these companies with ad space in your weekly issue. Now imagine the sales pitch to the guy who manages the PR budget in one of those companies:
You: Investing in ad space in our magazine will help your business boost revenue because our audience loves our content. They read every single issue from cover to end.
The budget guy: Well, that sounds great but, how long does your audience exactly spend reading your articles? how often do they actually get in touch with the companies running ads there? what is the conversion rate of $1 worth of ads in your magazine into actual revenue for a product in my category?
Fun conversation right?
As you can see, this guy doesn’t really care about how you’re going to do it, as long as investing in ads on your magazine gets him an above average ROI on his ad budget allocation. So how do you tackle this problem and give the guy what he wants?
You supercharge your understanding of your readership
This is what the internet does with us all the time.
Every single time we click on anything it gets recorded in order to draw a more detailed profile of who you are, what your interests are, what you might be afraid of, and ultimately what you might be likely buy. Yeah, this is all about selling you stuff. Under the current world order, selling you shit is the Internet’s ultimate objective.
Decades ago, media companies would try to understand their audience by doing expensive surveys that allowed them to better grasp things like demographics, average income, household headcount, race or proclivity to certain brands. Think about it, advertisers in that time needed to spend their ad budget in groups like “white, mid 40’s males with a 3–4 family who watch action movies”. Does that sound precise?
The hell it’s not. Take a look at this:
Today’s batches of users look more like “asian male in his 20–25s, who attends rock concerts on a monthly basis (from your event attendance on Facebook), consumes junk food (from the photos of your meals you upload to Instagram), likely has a partner (again your photos on Insta), lives in Tokyo (your basic Facebook profile or simply your checking-in on Google Maps), spends an average of $200 a month on apps (your usage of the App Store), is interested in traveling (your reading history on Medium or the Google App), and actually travels at least twice a year (your Google searches, usage data on Booking.com and Airbnb)”.
Freaked out? Well this is the world we live in.
As an advertiser this is a wonderful time to live in. Never in human history have we seen such a deep understanding of the consumer, hence, ROI on ads has never been higher.
Where do we go from here?
Do you want to escape the loop? Well go ahead, delete Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, stop using Google, Chrome, never talk to an assistant again (Siri or Alexa), no more buying on Amazon or cheap flight tickets on the internet, no more professional networking on LinkedIn, or free PR using SEO on search engines. Not going to happen.
Free services are only going to figure us out better and better as time goes by. Artificial Intelligence allows internet companies to enhance their offerings based on our clicks, views, comments, music playlists, “watch later” lists, subscriptions, followed accounts, wishlists, shopping carts, reading bookmarks, social circles, installed apps, extensions and so on. With this, we’ll increasingly become one with the services we use as we tailor them to serve us ideally, making the possibility of ever switching to another service nothing but a self-imposed curse. This is the new paradigm we have accepted in exchange for convenience and interconnectedness.
