Economics of Digital Media

Privacy is a more valuable commodity in the digital age. We’ve pretty much resigned ourselves to the notion that our government views our personal privacy as a privilege rather than a right and that we’ve been standing in the proverbial corner for quite a while now. 

There’s a pretty pervasive “we give up” attitude regarding government data collection. We care, of course, and we don’t like it, but it isn’t within our power to resist it. This overlying sense of Big Brother watching us ironically doesn’t seem to make us any more cautious. But it’s that resigned attitude that takes the sting out of the implications of things like store discount  card programs connected to our email accounts and cookies that follow us around, noting the things we like to click on and springing them on us as we search Google or scroll through our Facebook newsfeed.

The ever-evolving sophistication of online advertising techniques paint a pretty clear picture. Our online behavior and browsing habits have come to be viewed as a sort of abstract product. Advertisers, marketers, and business owners want to get at that information because it represents profit. And if more than one agenda can be addressed in one fell swoop, that’s even better. Our privacy is essentially the currency of the digital age.

Exploitation of our privacy in the name of profit increases has, inevitably, drawn attention to the ethical aspect of practices like native advertising. We’ve all experienced it at one point or another, when we search for a product or service via Google or on Amazon or eBay. Ten minutes later, upon logging into our Facebook accounts, the ads we see feature the same sort of products we’ve been perusing elsewhere. It’s sort of novel at first, and occasionally I’ve got to admit it’s been helpful. But it doesn’t take long for the creep factor to set in. 

Take for example the father of a teenage girl who, irate that the store had sent his daughter baby and pregnancy tailored advertisements in the mail, demanded an explanation. The explanation was a simple one. Target’s consumer tracking tools had simply honed into the fact that the man’s daughter was indeed pregnant.

And it gets better. 

According to a November article in the Atlantic, our smart technologies aren't just communicating with us, they're talking amongst themselves. And as they talk, they're providing valuable insight to advertisers about the users of those devices and the preferences they exhibit. 

Increasingly, websites are providing a disclaimer notifying visitors that the site is employing the use of cookies and this is often accompanied by an opt-out option. The interesting thing about this is that the wording almost makes it seem as though agreeing to be tracked is in the viewer’s best interest. “This website uses cookies to improve your experience” is far more persuasive than “Warning! We allow third parties to track you and your data may possibly be sold to the highest bidder!” 

The advent of these opt-out options on our US websites likely stems from the implementation of of the EU’s “cookie law”, which was intended to provide consumers with more options for data privacy. 

It shouldn’t have been surprising to me that news sites represent the most prolific use of third-party trackers, but it did, for exactly the reasons outlined in the Libert/Pickard article.

We expect a higher standard of ethics from our news providers. This makes sense, because as we’ve established, people seek out their news from certain sites for specific reasons, and one of the most compelling is that we’ve decided we trust the information we’re receiving there. 

Makes them seem a little greedy, though, doesn’t it? According to the Pew Research industry breakdown, news media represents billions of dollars in revenue. Maybe there’s a paradox there. Is the news industry’s impressive profit a direct and clear result of its use of third-party trackers? Research shows, for example, that the print segment of the news industry isn’t as close to its deathbed as we’ve been led to believe. 

Week 8 Reading Response

Reading some of the articles this week, I was reminded of one of my contributions last Tuesday concerning the reason I finally caved and got ad-block. I enjoyed the reading on paying for news content with privacy most because it highlighted some of the reasons I finally decided I was done being lenient with online advertising. It's the intrusiveness and the toll it takes on my browsing experience over time.

While the FCC works on regulations to curtail deceptiveness, I feel like there's a lot to be done to hone in on and regulate the actual code that makes online advertising so pervasive and annoying to consumers. For example, there should be regulation the limits the size of code that contains advertising - set by the FCC as opposed the the individual publisher. There should be code that regulates the size of code that contains tracking algorithms as well.

On principle as a visual communications major and as one of those people who actually watches the superbowl for the commercials (I know, I'm part of the problem), I generally don't mind advertising because in the middle of all the noise it generates, every once in a while, I will be accosted with something that actually stops me in my tracks with how well done it is.

However, due to the speed with which the internet is revolutionizing communication, I think advertisers - just like publishers - have been left to play catch-up and the general result has been what we see today - advertising that can no longer afford to depend only on creativity to reach its target audience but must now turn to the tactless science of user-tracking.

As the article on paying for content with privacy so eloquently puts it, user-tracking comes at you like a clown car packed with tracking code that slows down your browsing experience just to offer you ads that, in my personal opinion, don't really inspire you to purchase things you weren't already considering and as a result just end up creeping you out. It might be more effective than just taking shots in the dark but advertisers are clearly not thinking long-term. I suspect more consumers like me will be able to stomach it until the day they suddenly can't any longer.

Imagine a really really small police officer...

The readings this week made me think about tiny constables.  It’s not as weird as it sounds.

See, back in 2011, there was a case called United States v. Jones that went before the Supreme Court.  The issue at stake: whether or not attaching a GPS to someone’s car without a warrant was an “unreasonable search or seizure,” forbidden by the Fourth Amendment.  The court held, unanimously, that warrantless GPS tracking was unconstitutional.

This case is noteworthy for a couple of reasons.  First, because Scalia wrote a reasoned, logical, and fundamentally correct majority opinion upholding individual rights.  Not to speak ill of the dead, but that didn’t happen often.  But second, and of more interest to this class, Scalia and Alito had some interesting things to say about the changing state of government surveillance.

The two conservative justices both agreed that modern digital technology made tracking people’s actions possible to an extent that our founding fathers could never have envisioned as they wrote the Bill of Rights.  Justice Alito kind of adorably tries to frame GPS tracking in terms that Madison or Jefferson could have understood.  “Is it possible to imagine a case,” Alito writes, “in which a constable secreted himself somewhere in a coach and remained there for a period of time in order to monitor the movements of the coach’s owner?”

Of course it’s impossible.  There is no reason anyone in the eighteenth century would think that a policeman could shrink to the size of a button and subsist with no food, water, or air for months at a time in order to follow a suspect. It would have required, according to Alito, “either a gigantic coach, a very tiny constable, or both.”

I think about the tiny constable a lot when we come up against new problems in the digital age, problems that our government, our laws, and even our moral philosophers never imagined before.  These are grey areas where it’s not even clear what moral principals apply, much less how.

Trading personal privacy for access to news, as Libert and Pickard’s paper says we do, is a kind of tiny constable. It’s an attempt to use new technology to achieve a fairly dubious goal.  On the one hand, does it really hurt anyone for google to know their web history.  Targeted advertisements are pretty harmless in the long run.  Still, it freaks me out to know that my personal information is being mined like a natural resource. It’s upsetting, and I’d prefer to opt out.

Native advertising, too, is a tiny constable.  For an organization like Buzzfeed, something like “10 Facts about Beef Jerky that Will Make Your Brain Literally Explode” is so close to something they would publish anyway, it wouldn't matter if it’s actually sponsored by Bob’s Beef Jerky Company.  Could a publisher in the 1900s have imagined publishing so many soft news articles every hour that a few could actually be advertisements?

It’s unethical to trick someone into reading an ad when they think it’s supposed to be unbiased news.  And it’s unethical to spy on people without their permission.  But when media organizations come close to those lines without quite crossing them, we need new rules.  We can’t think about these issues in traditional terms like constables and carriages.  We have to understand what these companies are doing and why, and then we have to decide for ourselves what is acceptable.

Week 8

For some reason, last week’s battery of readings led me to believe that native advertising was an acceptable alternative to garish pop up ads, trick banners and floating ads.  After all, advertising - online and in print - isn’t going anywhere.  Ever.  Having done some research on both native and flashy ads in support of this week’s readings, I’m not so sure my admiration of native ads is going to last long. 

Here lies the evil of online ads in general, according a December 2013 New York Times piece: 

          "Unlike advertisements in magazines or on television, online ads let a company

          know when a consumer downloads a coupon, posts a product review or goes to

          a shopping site and buys its product."

While native ads don’t suck up as much bandwidth, and aren’t as distracting, they have an evil nature all their own.  Native ads are sneaky.  And they aren’t any less invasive of users’ privacy.  I feel like they prey on people’s naiveté and short attention spans.  And, as seen in the following examples, they can be almost subliminal:  http://www.copyblogger.com/examples-of-native-ads/  According to the article, they are “done well.”  And I have to agree, particularly in The Onion example.  

 

This article shows some more that don’t suck:  http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/native-advertising-examples

The best commentary about native ads that I stumbled upon came from HBO’s Jon Oliver of Last Week Tonight:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc

Even South Park is leaning into the fray with this week’s episode, addressing the evils of advertising - native ads in particular.  According to AdAge.com, "Content has become commerce. We have reached a perfect storm; the democratization of news providers and publishers, the record increase of ad avoidance, and the insatiable appetite for targeted content ads are working. People are clicking on native ads. Publishers are getting traffic. Companies are getting messages to their audiences.”  South Park has a history of mimicking the current social commentary, and their attention to the subject is a clear indication of how prevalent and detested it is.

I had to look up the word “advertorial,” although the meaning should have been self-evident.  Even its most basic definition seemed shifty: advertorials are deliberately crafted to fool people into thinking they are editorials.  My basic search of “disadvantages of advertorials” yielded nothing except tips on how to produce better advertorial for the first three results pages, at which point I got extremely bored and gave up.

A study by Professor David Franklyn at the University of San Francisco determined that only 35% of respondents were able to identify an advertisement, even when it was labeled as such.  Knowing that so many consumers are unable to differentiate between true content and advertisements, shouldn’t there be even more stringent rules governing their use?  I was glad to see that any regulations at all, they really don’t seem to be strict enough.  For example, "Section 5 of the FTC Act prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.”  Bearing that in mind, how can they exist at all?  It’s also worth noting that the FTC will prosecute the creators of the advertisement, rather than the company being promoted or the site itself, which seems fair at first glance.  While I agree that the company shouldn’t be penalized, I think the site running the ad should share the culpability.  They need to be aware of violations on their pages.

Buzzfeed used to be my guilty pleasure.  I thought it was a fun, relevant representation of viral stories. I never noticed that some of the stories were sponsored.  Seriously.  “9 Tips for Quick Cleaning” seemed useful.  Somehow, discovering that the piece was sponsored by Swiffer took the fun - and certainly the perception of objectivity - away.  I was one of those aforementioned naive, short attention span readers/consumers.  At a minimum, our readings have increased my awareness and made me look harder.  It seems there should be a required Internet 101 course that comes with your DLS/cable connection.   

Modern advertising is creepy. And, I think, is a clear violation of our privacy. Culling our browsing history online is just one aspect.  With Facebook now providing our geographical information to brick and mortar stores wiling to pay for the data, “creepy” takes on an entirely new dimension.  Now we’re being stalked online and on the street.  I can’t think of a better deterrent for NOT using Facebook!  I acknowledge that people who provide online services and content need to turn a profit in order to function and provide relevant content; however, the business model needs to change.  

We - as consumers of online content even have our own “buckets,” some of which are shown below:

Experian.com. (2015). Retrieved February 28, 2016, from http://www.experian.com/assets/marketing-services/brochures/mosaic-brochure-october-2014.pdf.

These pithy, alliterative titles annoy me.  I refuse to even figure out which one(s) I belong to. At the very least, this whole concept makes me want to just search “dolphins” or “industrial plumbing” or "Peruvian antiquities” just to throw off their data.

Week 8 Responses

Facebook to Tell Brands More About Who’s Near Their Stores, Tailor Ads to Them

Will there be a point in the future when advertising becomes too tailored? At what point will it become too cumbersome to track customers, locations, trends, and other data making it more tedious to target customers. Will this even become an issue or will this boost ROI to such a level that no other method of targeted advertising succeed. IF social media took a turn for the worse and ceased to be used by people, what would advertisers do to maintain such tailored advertising? I think it is somewhat dangerous to rely so much on social media for data.

I do appreciate that Facebook is keeping (at least for the time being) the data anonymous as to not breech our privacy too much. I would be even more inclined to cancel my Facebook if it was alerting companies that I, specifically, was walking near their store. That would be a complete breech of privacy.

Free? New Research Shows You’re Likely Paying With Your Privacy

“Because ad-blocking prevents publishers from gaining income they derive when ads are clicked, the CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau claimed that ‘ad blocking is robbery’ that could lead to an ‘internet apocalypse.’” I do not agree with this statement made by the CEO. Ad-block isn’t robbery at all. It is the same thing as throwing out a paper ad from the mail or changing the station when an ad comes on the radio or TV. Just because the ad could have been clicked on doesn’t mean it actually would have been. Thus, nothing gained, nothing lost. Also, the people who are blocking ads are probably the same people who won’t even click on the ad if they did see it.

Week 8 - Insidious Marketing

The first reading, "Industry breakdown: Newspapers still largest revenue segment," didn't come as a surprise as we've heard it class before. I found it interesting that modern media corporations are difficult to classify yet use legacy media as a business model. As companies diversify, why don't they apply new business models? Even the lowest earners still bring some income. Has anyone tried operating more smaller income models instead of focusing on a few traditionally big earners? The revenue stream would be smaller, but less lethal if one fails.

Native advertising is reprehensible. True, it's the consumer's personal responsibility to think critically, but native ads can be very hard to spot. How large of a factor are native ads in the loss of news audiences? The statistics show native ads receive more clicks, but that must be due to the deceptive nature and not always consumer interest.  I'm not easily offended, but many advertising practices manage to. I could type an angry rant on the subject, but feel John Oliver did a better job covering native ads on his Last Week Tonight show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc

Kudos to the FTC for their deceptive ad policy, but I don't think it goes far enough. It probably never will. Government budgets can prove difficult to authorize in sufficient amounts. Even if the FTC drafts a perfect policy, economics will plague enforcement ability.

I don't believe many people still think their online presence is anonymous. The public's aware data mining occurs constantly. I remember an old roommate (around 2002) telling me about malware infecting his system after visiting CNN.com. “Free? New research shows you’re likely paying with your privacy” is an important article, but a little late to the party. It's a known issue for at least 14 years in my mind.
On my home computers, I use a browser plug-in called Ghostery. It's basically an ad-blocker and populates a list of ads/data miners on every page, giving the option to block or not. It finds so many, I mostly "block all" and let it run 24/7 in the background. After this week's reading, I took some screenshots of news sites showing what Ghostery found:

CNN.com, 13 data trackers

Dallasnews.com, 18 data trackers

NYTimes.com, 12 data trackers

Washingtonpost.com, 10 data trackers

Forbes.com wouldn't let me access their site without turning Ghostery off, there's quite a few other websites with the same policy.

Ah, Facebook. I've had a "hate-hate" relationship with the service for most of it's existence, and only began a limited use of it a few months ago. At first, I disliked the idea of people knowing so much about me, but now I have to fight targeted ads too? It shouldn't be a surprise, FB made a deal to share user data with other companies a few years ago. In Australia last year, FB made a deal with Quantium, Acxiom and Experian to combine online and offline data for targeted ads.

http://www.adnews.com.au/news/facebook-makes-data-deal-with-quantium-acxiom-and-experian-to-fuse-offline-and-online-data

The article explaining how FB plans to sell user location data to retailers for consumer targeting reminds me of a scene in the movie Minority Report. In the film, advertisers use retinal scans to identify and target consumers by name. The concept is invasive and wrong, but I imagine tantalizing to soulless companies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiDMlFycNrw

The really scary thought is Minority Report's ad scenario is not far off. It's even likely if the public keeps taking little to no action now.

The unfortunate reality of journalism funding is advertising, and that worked for many years. It could still work, provided ad agencies tone down their products. If not, the public may need to demand an updated digital business model for news.

Hell, we should demand one regardless.

Economics of Digital Media - Ladson

Newspapers Still Largest Revenue Segment Response

The Pew Research Center article that broke down revenue amounts of different news platforms was interesting. I did not realize that TV-based news generates less than half the revenue of the U.S. newspaper sector, has this always been true? If I were to take an educated guess I would say yes, because there was even more newspapers before this time period. Thinking about the trend toward more polarization in news, particularly TV news, I would think that the TV platform would allow for more targeted advertising than traditional newspapers that try to stay balanced.

I also thought it was interesting that half of the revenue of cable news was due to license fees. As more people ditch cable for streaming services, cable news faces another possible leak in its revenue stream.

Spending on Native Advertising Soars Response

The Business Insider article on native advertising says that consumers hold a generally positive attitude toward native advertising, really? I wonder if it is because they do not realize it is an ad? Or maybe they have a positive attitude because these native ads have been tailored to items they interested in purchasing? Or maybe it is because they are comparing the ads to “traditional” popup ads? Besides a few funny animal commercials, I do not hear much “positive” about traditional ads so I would like to know more.

FCC’s Enforcement Policy Statement Response

While it is encouraging that the FCC is current and has updated its deceptively formatted advertisements to include digital media, the policy seems to focus on the deception of the format, versus the content of the ad. Maybe the content policy is in a different section? And I wonder about enforcement, do FCC officials actively go out and monitor ads, or do they only respond to consumer complaints? I also did not realize the lengths encyclopedia salesman went through to make a sale, were encyclopedia sets that lucrative? Based on sales tactics described in the policy, we all owe Wikipedia and digital libraries ‘thank yous’ for saving us from elaborate encyclopedia salesman tactics. 

Paying With Privacy Response

I agree with the authors’ point that “there seems to be a strange silence surrounding the ethics of native advertising.” I did not realize that newspaper sites had more tracking than the rest of the web. That would explain why advertising for a dress I was looking at kept haunting me when I was on the site of a local newspaper; at the time I thought it was odd, maybe that I found the dress online in a different way than I remembered. I did not make the time to connect the dots, or maybe I just accepted that my activity was all connected and didn’t want to spend the energy getting to the root of it.

Toward the end of the article, the authors suggest that they do not wish the economic model supporting journalism to collapse, but that earlier they compared news sites to “a clown car” makes me wonder.

Facebook to Tell Brands Who’s Near Their Stores Response/Connection to Outside Material

The people who run Facebook are superb at finding ways to make money. Maybe we should have them brainstorm how to save the “news” industry. Sure, it would involve them taking over and reaping the benefits, but what can’t this company do? They already have people in some third world countries thinking Facebook is the Internet.

Digital News -- Revenue: Fact Sheet Response

The article mentions a different report that said on FB and Twitter the percentage growth of mobile display advertising equaled the percentage decline of desktop display ads,  are desktops going the way of the dinosaur? Surely not yet, but companies are moving away from them, is it just because mobile has the biggest room for growth and companies want to seem innovative and on top of trends? Earlier reports we have read said that only a small portion of people even use Twitter, I bet the portion of people who use desktops is extraordinarily high.

Week 8: Economics of digital media

The common theme I noticed in this week’s readings was digital spending/digital revenue/digital ad information sharing, and it left me feeling generally pretty bummed.

The Pew Research article “Industry Breakdown: Newspaper Still Largest Revenue Segment,” included some interesting numbers. I had NO idea print so heavily and decisively outpaced television as the lead money maker. It goes along with what we discussed last week: that despite what I’ve heard for so many years, newspapers aren’t yet gasping for last breaths on their collective deathbed. I read the Newspaper Association of America total revenue numbers twice before they actually registered; $38.6 BILLION for 1,400 U.S. dailies, compared with 16.4 billion for 12 cable news channels and 800 news-producing local TV stations. Wow.

The eye-opening article of the week for me was the one that (formally) introduced me to “native” advertising: “Spending on native advertising is soaring as marketers and digital media publishers realize the benefits.”  I had no idea this was what it was called, although after looking it up, I realized I’ve been aware of it and seeing it for quite some time. And I hate it. It’s trickery and it’s misleading, especially as it appears on the news sites I like to visit. It’s true those companies add (by law, see next paragraph) a qualifier or button to distinguish something as an ad, but on news sites especially, the ads look like they’re legitimate content <at first glance>. I’ve also seen native ads on one of my favorite social media sites, Instagram. These bother me a little less, for some reason. I might, on occasion, even be interested enough to click on one there. I’m at a loss to explain why they bother me so much on one platform and not the other.

Of course I laughed a little at next article—the FTC policy (rather new!) about deceptive native ads. It’s comforting, I guess, that as the world and its media expand and adapt, the FTC is at its heels, mostly, making sure we don’t get taken advantage of.  Something did come to mind, though. How do we factor those pesky 30-second-or-more-long ads we occasionally can’t opt out of before a YouTube video, or ads at the beginning on an online news report? I feel like I should always have the choice to opt out. I figure they are the price I have to pay (ha) to watch the content. Those aren’t deceptive, per say, but they seem unfair, and I feel like I should have a choice.

In “Think you’re reading the news for free? New research shows you’re likely paying with your privacy,” the authors explained that browsing news-related sites exposes consumers to being tracked, often more frequently than on other places they visit online. Something the authors brought up really got to me: that ad blockers might be seen as a hindrance to someone’s business model. Meaning, I’m on a business’ site, so I ought to pay with my privacy for their content. Uh…NO? If you want to me to pay you with/for something, how about go ahead and charge me? Let’s be honest here! Back to the topic of tracking, I’m going to leave this right here:

“It should come as no surprise that this practice, as it becomes better understood, doesn’t sit well with the public.

Extensive survey research has shown that users are opposed to such invasions of their privacy. At the same time, they feel like there’s nothing they can do to protect themselves.”

The Advertising Age article about Facebook made me wonder: why does everybody want to know where I am, all the time? That was sort of the appeal of growing up, right? Knowing that one day I wouldn’t have to explain my whereabouts, without someone (hi, mom) always needing to track my moves. It’s MY privacy, and it’s my right to NOT share information. I don’t remember anyone ever asking me if it was okay. Instead the burden is on me to dig deep into Facebook’s privacy settings to figure out a way to opt out. In the end, I think it’s all about the money. Facebook was, at first, this outlet that was famous for being private about its data. Now it sells the details to those willing to shell out the cash. Troubling.

The final Pew Research article, “Digital News—Revenue Fact Sheet,” had me wondering: digital ads seem to be something advertisers are spending huge bucks on, but who’s watching? (Not me!) How do advertisers qualify them as a success? Is it simply a click, a certain amount of time spent on an ad? And am I alone in finding these ads more annoying with each passing day?

Week 8: Economics of digital media

Week 8: Economics of digital media

Blogger note: As I finished my reading responses for this, I realized I found myself beginning to think more about how these articles contribute to the idea of digital culture that we talked about in the first weeks of classes. I've come to the conclusion that I think advertising is a big part of our digital culture and appreciated the opportunity to finally read things that tie into what I originally thought this class would be about!

“Industry breakdown: Newspapers still largest revenue segment”

So if I understand this correctly, newspapers accumulate the most revenue of all the news sectors, most of which is the result of advertising fees. Without the advertising factored in, the revenue is closer to the number local TV news. So I’m beginning to think that advertisers prefer to buy newspaper ads, which illustrates their inherent biases towards print. But I’m struggling to decide how this figures into everything else we’ve read so far.

“Spending on native advertising is soaring as marketers and digital media publishers realize the benefits”

I think this must be a really interesting article to read in full! I personally hate social-native and native-style display ads. I always click the ‘x’ in Twitter to remove them from my feed when possible and luckily Ghostery helps eliminate them on my MacBook Pro. they’re especially horrible on my iPhone.

I do not mind sponsored content, however, I never click to read sponsored posts on websites, but I like that it’s generally clear what they are and sometime I am intrigued. At the same time, I never really go online to shop for anything but books so I avoid temptation on well-done sponsored content.

FTC’s “enforcement policy statement on deceptively formatted advertisements” 

I’m glad to know the FTC has a policy on advertisements that may trick readers into engaging with them. I appreciated reading about the past cases that illustrate the different types of misleading ads. It’s astonishing the lengths to which people will go. I which there was a section here for really persistent ads. This document covers ad formats, but in this digital age I think they should also cover ad behavior.

The telemarketing example in the misleading door openers made me laugh because I think I was a telemarketer when I worked at my undergraduate college’s call center where we called alumni and parents to ask them to donate money. I never straight up told anyone I was calling to ask for money, instead I was encouraged to emphasize that I wanted to get to know the caller and offer my perspective on student life to make them nostalgic; make it seem like I just wanted to chat. After a few minutes, I would then have to begin to start asking for donations, but most people knew what I was doing before it would get to that point.

 “Free? New research shows you’re likely paying with your privacy” 

I missed the news about Apple allowing ad-blocking and immediately began to do my research for which to app to download. I can tolerate invasive ads on my MacBook Pro, but I can’t on my iPhone.

I had learned last year about how social media platforms, namely Facebook, provides their services free by data mining. But it is interesting to hear about this happening in the news industry as well, at such an alarming rate. At the mention of NPR in the article, I visited the site and my Ghostery application detected 22 trackers, which is more than most website. And most frightening was the number labeled advertising that I had never encountered before and for which I had to flip the block switch on.

I really appreciated how this article touched on a lot of different perspectives and considerations that linked to further reading (i.e. the misuses of data and “Do Not Track” stuff). I was actually motivated to link on a lot of the hyperlinked text.

“Facebook to tell brands more about who’s near their stores, tailor ads to them”

For a social media platform, it is very clear that Facebook spends a lot of time and energy trying to find new ways for advertising to reach more people. It’s absolutely ridiculous. And because so few people realize it, or care, they will get away with it and continue to become more and more powerful by shaping the digital environment (or digital culture, if you will).

“Digital news revenue: fact sheet”

Given these stats, it’s not hard to see why people are as concerned about mobile device producers like Apple enabling ad-blocking. There’s so much money being made by social media and technology companies. Not only do advertising giants have to worry, but the companies who sell the ad space. It will be exciting to see how things evolve in the years that ad-blocking grows in popularity which will cause tech giants to find other ways to maintain their revenue.

I predict they will either find themselves in the same problem as print newspapers, struggling to adapt to the new digital culture and going to desperate means to stay afloat. Or they will be crafty and unethical in their means to defeat ad-blocking. I don’t see Facebook investing in new methods that would be mutually beneficial to both them and society. It’s not a part of their business culture.