Nicholas Sheppard
Someone
recently suggested to me that the cyberlibertarians who shouted "information wants to be free"
in the 1990s might be responsible for the present-day Internet being
awash with targeted advertising and the data collection that it entails.
As I understand the argument, the claim is that academic free-content
advocates — themselves largely supported by public funding — insisted
that the Internet provide information free of charge. Requiring funding
to actually create and maintain web sites, companies like Google and
Facebook turned to advertising. And so our searches, profiles, news,
emails and much else besides now come with corporate messages attached.
Even better, Internet companies are able to leverage the intimate
knowledge that they have of their users to better serve the messaging
needs of their actual customers (the advertisers).
Whatever the merits of this argument, I think it it does expose two
elephants in the room when it comes to making information free: public
funding and advertising. Little information of any substance is
ultimately free — most "free" information is paid for by the public or
by advertisers. I guess most of the rest is donated by contributors
after doing whatever it is they do to earn a salary.
Now, I think there
are some good arguments for providing public information at public
expense, and plenty of us accept advertising in return for free-to-air
television, inexpensive newspapers and convenient search engines. But
would it sound so cool to be proclaiming "information wants to be funded
by the public" or "information wants to carry advertising"? And would
anyone sign up for a service boasting that "your information wants to be free to advertisers"?
When I worked in copyright and digital media, I sometimes heard
suggestions that the music industry needed to find a business model that
"feels free". Google certainly seems to make plenty of money this way,
even if the return on investment for social media companies is open to debate.
But "feels free" implies "ignorant of the cost", leaving search engine
and social media users surprised and offended whenever the data
collection activities of their "free" service providers are disclosed.
All this got me wondering: would anyone actually pay for searching or
social media if it meant they could do so without advertising and
without being the subject of data collection machinery? (Let's assume
for the moment that we can trust our paid-for search engines and social
media providers to ignore or discard whatever data we send through their
services.)
Some people do pay for email services and personal web sites —
though a quick survey of my address book shows that the great majority
are using either a work address, or one of Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail. Most
of the exceptions, including me, are professional computer
technologists for whom setting up email systems and websites is all in
a day's work. Many people also pay for access to online virtual worlds
like World of Warcraft and Second Life, and
some pay for online dating services. But I don't think I've ever heard
of anyone paying to search the web or join a social
network.
I went on to discover (using a free search engine of course) that some psychologists have argued for the existence of a "zero price effect"
by which users choose products offered at no charge even when, all
things considered, paying for a similar product would serve them better. Lawyers following these psychologists consequently argue that
legislators ought to consider restricting the use of "free".
That's not to say that we should outlaw services and
products offered without charge, but that we should describe
ad-supported, publicly-funded and other indirectly-supported services as
such and not as "free". As David Adam Friedman puts it, "the free offer with accompanying obligation should no
longer be considered free".
So let me re-phrase my earlier question: given the choice between a
search engine or social network that collected your money, or one that
collected your data, which would you choose? Because "free" is not an option.
Showing posts with label advertising. Show all posts
Showing posts with label advertising. Show all posts
Thursday, 7 August 2014
Tuesday, 24 January 2012
Draining the Heart of the Internet: Is targeted marketing destroying the surfing experience?
Izzy Woods
The saying “just because you're paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you” can be directly applied to Internet marketing these days. Targeted ads, often courtesy of Google AdWords and AdSense, appear on just about every page we visit online. Type an email to your mother and mention the carrots you ate the night before, and suddenly every sidebar and header ad is about carrots, cooking, or where to find cooked carrots. Casually type a comment about babies while responding to a friend’s Facebook comment, and almost instantly your entire Internet experience will involve baby-centric banner advertisements and notices. While Adwords and search engine marketing techniques have exponentially increased the efficiency of marketing and the reach of products and brands, and while most consumers have become accustomed to this rapid response to the minutiae in our heads, the practice is still mildly unsettling.
Back in the day
It all began with pay-per-click advertising in the late 90s. The ability of advertisers to place their ads where a potential customer could easily select the option to visit their site or product proved to be quite successful for all involved. In the late 90s, the average consumer was still wildly enamoured with the very fact that “surfing” the net, moving easily from place to place, was an option, so having a pay-per-click ad or two appear seemed novel. The fact that the ad was targeted was interesting as opposed to annoying. Google Adwords, launched in 2000, was the harbinger of developments to come. The Adwords program is now an integral part of our online experience. In a nutshell, the service, and others like it, allows advertisers to choose a series of keywords that will activate ads to appear in sidebars, banners, and pop-ups. The advertiser pays a specified amount per click by a potential consumer. The more money the advertiser is willing to bid per click, combined with the amount of traffic their site receives and the quality of the site itself, determines how prominently the ad is displayed on the page. Most often, it is Google Adwords that causes that one line about carrots to equal banner ads about vegetables for the next hour, or the appearance of advertisements about Gerber and Pampers that dot the electronic landscape once you leave Facebook.
This instant advertising gratification is further compounded by the use of more basic search engine marketing techniques, like keyword analysis, link and page popularity, back-end techniques like image tagging, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion in website directories, to name just a few. The result is that surfing the Internet now means navigating a series of advertisements, in addition to searching for the information you actually need. In the marketing community’s quest to generate more traffic and increase visibility, advertising has become almost as prevalent as general information on the web, and often the two are conflated in tricky ways that make it difficult to separate fact from a possibly manufactured version of the truth.
The real story
This is where “conspiracy theories” come into play. With targeted advertising and, recently, with the development of targeted links to content as well, our Internet experience is becoming more and more confined to those mentions of carrots and babies. The true “surfing” experience is no more. There was a time when it was possible to make cognitive leaps on the Internet that were solely based on where our brains chose to go, as opposed to where an advertiser nudged us to go. Those days seem long gone now. Consumer groups have been grumbling since the advent of paid search advertising. They point to the way advertising is presented on the Internet, and how some ads are presented in such a way that the very fact that they are advertisements is hidden. Pay-per-click advertising also opened up a whole new level of online trademark infringement, as companies raced to gain possession of common or popular terms, so that their ads would appear more prominently. In fact, in 2011, Google began preventing Adwords clients from buying up other links in order to increase their ranking. The end result is that the World Wide Web is becoming increasingly limited to only what exists in the user’s immediate world. Half the fun of going online used to be stumbling across a website or finding a new band from overseas. Now, the use of targeted technologies is drastically limiting our experience and, consequently, it is also limiting the possibility of connection or discussion with others that used to be the heart of the Internet.
The saying “just because you're paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you” can be directly applied to Internet marketing these days. Targeted ads, often courtesy of Google AdWords and AdSense, appear on just about every page we visit online. Type an email to your mother and mention the carrots you ate the night before, and suddenly every sidebar and header ad is about carrots, cooking, or where to find cooked carrots. Casually type a comment about babies while responding to a friend’s Facebook comment, and almost instantly your entire Internet experience will involve baby-centric banner advertisements and notices. While Adwords and search engine marketing techniques have exponentially increased the efficiency of marketing and the reach of products and brands, and while most consumers have become accustomed to this rapid response to the minutiae in our heads, the practice is still mildly unsettling.
Back in the day
It all began with pay-per-click advertising in the late 90s. The ability of advertisers to place their ads where a potential customer could easily select the option to visit their site or product proved to be quite successful for all involved. In the late 90s, the average consumer was still wildly enamoured with the very fact that “surfing” the net, moving easily from place to place, was an option, so having a pay-per-click ad or two appear seemed novel. The fact that the ad was targeted was interesting as opposed to annoying. Google Adwords, launched in 2000, was the harbinger of developments to come. The Adwords program is now an integral part of our online experience. In a nutshell, the service, and others like it, allows advertisers to choose a series of keywords that will activate ads to appear in sidebars, banners, and pop-ups. The advertiser pays a specified amount per click by a potential consumer. The more money the advertiser is willing to bid per click, combined with the amount of traffic their site receives and the quality of the site itself, determines how prominently the ad is displayed on the page. Most often, it is Google Adwords that causes that one line about carrots to equal banner ads about vegetables for the next hour, or the appearance of advertisements about Gerber and Pampers that dot the electronic landscape once you leave Facebook.
This instant advertising gratification is further compounded by the use of more basic search engine marketing techniques, like keyword analysis, link and page popularity, back-end techniques like image tagging, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion in website directories, to name just a few. The result is that surfing the Internet now means navigating a series of advertisements, in addition to searching for the information you actually need. In the marketing community’s quest to generate more traffic and increase visibility, advertising has become almost as prevalent as general information on the web, and often the two are conflated in tricky ways that make it difficult to separate fact from a possibly manufactured version of the truth.
The real story
This is where “conspiracy theories” come into play. With targeted advertising and, recently, with the development of targeted links to content as well, our Internet experience is becoming more and more confined to those mentions of carrots and babies. The true “surfing” experience is no more. There was a time when it was possible to make cognitive leaps on the Internet that were solely based on where our brains chose to go, as opposed to where an advertiser nudged us to go. Those days seem long gone now. Consumer groups have been grumbling since the advent of paid search advertising. They point to the way advertising is presented on the Internet, and how some ads are presented in such a way that the very fact that they are advertisements is hidden. Pay-per-click advertising also opened up a whole new level of online trademark infringement, as companies raced to gain possession of common or popular terms, so that their ads would appear more prominently. In fact, in 2011, Google began preventing Adwords clients from buying up other links in order to increase their ranking. The end result is that the World Wide Web is becoming increasingly limited to only what exists in the user’s immediate world. Half the fun of going online used to be stumbling across a website or finding a new band from overseas. Now, the use of targeted technologies is drastically limiting our experience and, consequently, it is also limiting the possibility of connection or discussion with others that used to be the heart of the Internet.
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