Living with the surveillance state
Living with the surveillance state
Posted Nov 1, 2013 4:26 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333)In reply to: Living with the surveillance state by hummassa
Parent article: Living with the surveillance state
Hrm.
'businesses that depend on these advertisements'. I mean like toilet paper companies, vacuum cleaner salesmen, car companies, movie producers, and other people that purchase ads online and provide the money that 'social' websites need to thrive off of. They depend on advertisements to sell their products. They give money to advertising agencies that then buy space on popular websites.
That's the money that pays for all the bandwidth, servers, etc that companies like facebook use to attract the demographics that the advertisers want.
One thing to always keep in mind with these companies is that the primary business of companies like Google or Facebook or Twitter or whatever isn't the online services they provide you. Their primary business is selling you, the user and every bit of personal info they can get their hands on, to the advertisers. Bundling you up and creating packages that the advertisers can pick and choose from.
I used to work for a company that did this sorts of stuff successfully pre-internet. They depended on mortgage companies selling your personal data. State governments selling your personal data. Drivers license info, credit card spending habits, and all that stuff for tracking people and carving them up into demographics and worked with the Post Office to make sure that they had accurate information on people living at various addresses. Used it for junk mail.
Now that information combined with your online habits and email history they can paint a much more complete picture of you and figure out how to bundle you with other people and sell you.
It seems likely to me that there is a widespread and epidemic practice of generating false metrics in order to drive up prices for advertisers. Not just by people like Google or whatever, although they are part of it, but all the people that get kick-backs from google. Youtube users, people advertising crap on facebook, people trying to drive traffic to their blogs, etc etc. It goes top to bottom. Ranging from small time BS, to organized crime and botnets.
Once the advertising agencies, or the companies that spend the money on the advertising agencies, figure out how to accurately gauge the effect of those advertisements on the buying habits of the public then I figure there will be a significant constriction in the online service industries.
Especially if at around the same time we enter into a new stage of 'recession' in the economy. As long as people have big budgets then sometimes the main problem is just figuring out how to spend it. However that can change if corporations start having to penny pinch.
Posted Nov 1, 2013 7:54 UTC (Fri)
by klbrun (subscriber, #45083)
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Posted Nov 1, 2013 9:50 UTC (Fri)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
Of course. Was there any doubt? When Google just started effectiveness of ads on it's search pages was off-the-charts. It was ten or maybe hundred times more effective then TV ads (per dollar spent). Of course such thing brought marketing guys in droves, ads filled less and less relevant pages and effectiveness of ads went down. Guess what exactly limits said process? Right: other forms of advertisement. Internet spending grows till it starts wasting more or less the same percentage as other mediums. This, again, shows how wrong drag is: short-term cheaters win, but medium-term mediums with better metrics win (and long-term we are all dead which makes this case not very interesting).
Posted Nov 1, 2013 9:43 UTC (Fri)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (5 responses)
Google is not part of it. Not because they are all that “altruistic” or “fair”, but because all such shenanigans can only ever provide temporary boost and Google does not need temporary boost: it makes more then enough money short-term and it's goal is to convince advertisers to continue to spend money on them long-term. That means that when Google discover some large cheats it usually cracks on them and “miss the expectations” that quarter. Small cheaters can get away with their schemes for awhile, alas. LOL. Nope. The effect will be the exact opposite. You think Google business is big? TV ads business dwarfs it by a huge margin. It's budgets are slowly moving to the Internet because it already easier to gauge the effect of the ads on the Internet. If someone will find even better way to more accurately measure effects of the ads on the Internet then Internet will get bigger slice of the advertisement fee. Wrong again. We are not in the 'recession', we are in the first stages of extremely large depression (thing Great Depression… only bigger). All the corporations are hurting because buyers are just not there (and buyers are not there because they don't have money). What does it mean? If you'll start to “penny pinch” then you'll go under even faster. Which will probably mean that medium-term ads will become even more important. Long-term, yes, situation will be different (if all your competitors go bankrupt and you are left alone then you don't really need more ads, right?), but this stage is many years removed from today.
Posted Nov 1, 2013 22:02 UTC (Fri)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Nov 2, 2013 0:50 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (3 responses)
Do you need theory or evidence? Evidence is there if you look for it, situation with theory is much harder because last century was spent in building nice mathematical models which explained how you can achieve infinite growth on a finite planet. They apparently don't work, but we have no new ones just yet. As for evidence… it's there if you know where to look. These are all smokes and mirrors. They are supposed to be “early indicators” for the future employment rates, but they no longer work that way. If you'll take a look on the the actual situation with the labor force then there are no improvement. Official explanation of difference between this rosy picture and the sad reality which non-easily-falsifiable metrics gives us is “oh, that's all about baby boomers, you know they are retiring and there are fewer young workers”, but if you'll visit the appropriate site you'll find out that number of workers above 65 was 64.54 million five years ago, 78.78 million year ago and 81.97 year today. IOW: these pesky baby boomers are not retiring, instead they work till they drop! What goes down instead are workers between 35 and 44 years. This basically means that this actually-not-so-rosy picture is completely artificial: government just writes off millions of people (they apparently like to live on subsidies). This four years after the end of recession, remember? Europe? Don't make me laugh. The only country which is in good shape is Germany and they don't have resources to bail everyone else out.
Posted Nov 3, 2013 11:37 UTC (Sun)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link] (2 responses)
However, I think your point is more to the long term. The thing is, our ability to produce things is indeed limited by a finite planet, but most of the economy (80%) is in services, not goods and there no particular limit to the number of services that can be provided. I can see production of goods stabilising (if it hasn't happened already).
That's not to say there aren't challenges. Fossil fuels will run out and we need to replace them with some other energy source and drastically improve efficiency. But I'm a glass half full kinda guy and there are signs of movement. Our economy is 20 years will look radically different, but hey it looked radically different 20 years ago too.
That said, I'm not entirely sure about the US. They have a serious problem at the political level and it's not clear they look far enough ahead to make the necessary adjustments for a smooth transition.
Posted Nov 3, 2013 14:51 UTC (Sun)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (1 responses)
the government has surprisingly little influence on business in the US, especially on the direction of what businesses do.
Posted Nov 29, 2013 9:13 UTC (Fri)
by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
[Link]
Living with the surveillance state
Living with the surveillance state
Living with the surveillance state
It seems likely to me that there is a widespread and epidemic practice of generating false metrics in order to drive up prices for advertisers. Not just by people like Google or whatever, although they are part of it, but all the people that get kick-backs from google.
Once the advertising agencies, or the companies that spend the money on the advertising agencies, figure out how to accurately gauge the effect of those advertisements on the buying habits of the public then I figure there will be a significant constriction in the online service industries.
Especially if at around the same time we enter into a new stage of 'recession' in the economy. As long as people have big budgets then sometimes the main problem is just figuring out how to spend it. However that can change if corporations start having to penny pinch.
Living with the surveillance state
we are in the first stages of extremely large depression (thing Great Depression… only bigger)
Do you have any evidence for this peculiar statement? I've never heard it anywhere else outside the sort of website that tells you to turn all your money into gold and beat it into gold-lined tinfoil hats to keep the chemtrails off. The US in particular is barely in recession at all any more, and many metrics (housebuilding starts, household debt ratios, etc) are rapidly improving. Even Europe is out of crisis, though hardly in ideal state yet.
Living with the surveillance state
Do you have any evidence for this peculiar statement?
The US in particular is barely in recession at all any more, and many metrics (housebuilding starts, household debt ratios, etc) are rapidly improving.
Even Europe is out of crisis, though hardly in ideal state yet.
Living with the surveillance state
Living with the surveillance state
Living with the surveillance state