Yay for free Facebook!
Some computer illiterate people like me wonder how on earth Facebook can stay open and cater to all these people around the world without charging a cent. Any business savvy person can tell you that corporate businesses have no interest in giving out information for free when it can be charged for. Facebook is actually earning money from us in two ways (that I am aware of there could be more); they are gathering information about us such as age, gender, sexual preferences, jobs, hobbies, and attended high schools and selling this information to advertising companies to utilize when considering the demographics for their advertisements. Next Facebook uses this information about us (ex. hobbies) and advertises right back at us about things that it thinks will be most relevant and interesting to us. Any of the ads we find interesting and click on instantly earns Facebook more money from the advertising companies! I feel kind of used don’t you? But why stop there? There are 6.6 billion people on this planet and only over 50 million as of November 2007 on Facebook. Facebook actually gets its users to advertise for itself through the tantalizing idea of being able to connect with people that don’t have Facebook. You invite your friends to use Facebook, which they then add and provide their information, which then allows the site to earn more money off of them. This is a classic example of corporate interests problematizing the notion of the Internet as a free public space it was designed to be.
3 comments:
Im sorry, but that first post had so many spelling errors that if I had let it remain i couldn't possibly show my facebook in public again...
Advertising on facebook is only a natural progression. If you look at the way advertising invades our lifespaces, what makes facebook anymore holly than that??
I know for me personally I would prefer to be targeted on facebook with adds that may actually interest me, rather than assaulted by random garbage everywhere i go in real life.
Facebook wants our souls.
But it's not going to get them so it will have to settle for our personal information.
I think it's a little irritating that they make us they're little marketing pawns, but hey, if they didn't, we would be paying for Facebook. Like you said, they are out to make money, and right now, our personal info is how they do it, its that or pay to use the site.
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