For whatever value Facebook has for keeping track of your friends, social media seems like more of a loss to our society than a gain. How does Facebook AND Twitter make money? I never see any advertising, so where he is the money coming from? Aliens mining the text?
For reasons I can't divine, most people do see ads. (Ad blocker? What's that?)
ReplyDeleteAnd it works. People see ads and buy shit. (Or so they think. Some indication that Google and FB et al are overstating the effect of ads.)
And then there is the theory that it is all financed by the NSA because the need the data.
Good questions. I've asked myself the same thing, and the only answer I ever came up with (that made sense) was something like "Data Mining".
ReplyDeleteI tried .. once .. to establish a FaceBook account, but the detailed personal information they required (a screen image of my drivers license?) was too intrusive.
My personal decision has been to keep a slightly lower online profile.
Step one .. Facebook Is The Devil!
Everything after that is more information than I care to share.
That's good advice (you'll thank me for this some day)
While they're doing their best to kill it, Twitter's stream of tweets provides invaluable data on current trends and the like. Its problem is not so much revenue, 2.5 billion in FY 2016, but that its spending is out of control, and of course poorly directed.
ReplyDeleteFacebook has serious advertising revenue, but of course, like the rest of these companies, "If you aren't paying for it, you are the product". For the advertising part of that there's ad blocks as has been noted. For general tracking by both of these I use the Chrome Disconnect extension.
Facebook is a primary tool my local units of government and electrical utility use for quick communication, and has, for example, helped find lots of missing people and criminals. If not for that, I wouldn't bother with it at all.