Ernüchternde Zeilen zum Thema “kostenlose Services” (Gmail, Flickr, Facebook, etc.) und “der Kunde ist das Produkt”. Nicht nur waren User immer schon das eigentliche Produkt; sie – Kunden! – als Werbeziel zu verkaufen bringt schlichtweg höheren Profit als ihre Service-Entgelte und Nutzungsbeiträge.
Television and radio, newspapers and magazines—they all sell your attention to their primary customers: advertisers. Even things you “pay for” sell you off to advertisers because you really don’t pay for them—you only cover part of the costs. Despite this obvious and longstanding fact of life, while everyone bitches about commercials, no one says TV networks are insidious or underhanded because they run ads. I’ve never heard of anyone boycotting Mad Men because they don’t want to be a product sold by AMC.
Und am Beispiel Twitter noch einmal zusammengefasst:
Twitter had made an economic assessment of its users and decided they were worth more as advertising targets than as paying customers. Exactly. And those other evil bastards of the internet, Google and Facebook, have done the same thing.