Facebook loves you. Facebook adores you. I'm confident that Mark Zuckerberg lies awake at night and dreams of you. He dreams of new ways to make you happy, new adjustments he can make to how Facebook looks and works to keep you using it, keep you visiting. Better yet, to make Facebook indispensable to you, and to make you urge all your friends and family to use Facebook, so we can all be one big happy Facebook family and sing Kumbaya together. All 800 million of us Facebook users.
Yeah, Mark's a great guy to want to do that, right? Of course, while he's doing that he'll also collect a lot of information about you, but he means well, right? Of course he does. He means very well - for himself. You see, Mark doesn't just keep that information in some big Facebook server. He sells it, whenever he can, to whoever he can. That's how Facebook makes it's money. Advertising. That's really all that Facebook is - one very large, smoothly run advertising machine. All those ads you see that pop up on the right are paid for by the advertisers. They pay either for every thousand times the ad appears or pay for every time someone clicks. A click generally brings in about 50-75 cents for Facebook, depending on a number of factors.
Facebook is also an auction house, selling advertising space to the highest bidder in a complex plan that covers us 800 million users in great detail. Did you know that advertisers can choose the criteria for where that ad appears? And the scary part, to exactly who it appears. All that profile data that you fill in when you join allows targeted advertising. So do all your likes. Facebook tells you to like something, to check in, to tell us what restaurants we like, what stores we frequent so all your friends will know what you're doing and more about you! Gosh, I 'm feeling warm and fuzzy just thinking about it!
Then they sell targeted ads based on all that information that you gave them absolutely free - data that most marketing companies (which is what Facebook really is) must pay millions to collect. I'll admit, it's pretty slick. I've run Facebook ads for An Ordinary Fairy to attract people to my fan page. You can be very specific, by age group, gender, location (down to individual cities, if you like), and most importantly, all those likes of yours. So I target women aged 18 and up who live in the US and UK who like Fairies. It works. I have 1,750 fans. Which cost me about $2,000 to collect.
I read a great article on all this in USA Today a few weeks ago, but unfortunately lost the link. The point of the article was this: Never delude yourself into thinking that Facebook is a free service put out on the Internet by Mark Zuckerberg out of the goodness of his heart for your benefit. Don't ever think that you're his customer. His customers are all us advertisers - you, my friends, are just his product. You, your attention, and your data are what he delivers to his advertisers.
Sorry, but you're just another bag of potato chips.
1 comments:
I guess that is better than being a bag of Cheetos?
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