In my new Guardian column, I point out that the big-data-driven surveillance business model is on the rocks.
Once upon a time, you could sell soap with a slogan like "You will be clean," but we become resistant to ads. While Big Data initially generated some promising sell-through results, these days, companies like Facebook are relying on non-surveillance techniques for their growth.
Remember when Xynga’s “social games” like Farmville seemed to colonise the limbic systems of everyone you knew, stealing away their hours with a fiendishly addictive game-mechanic? In short order, most of Xynga’s players grew inured to the game’s temptations, leaving behind a rump of especially susceptible players who were not enough to sustain the game, nor its makers’ high-flying share price.
Likewise, the “surveillance business model” of building up detailed electronic dossiers on internet users in order to predict what they want to buy and how to sell it to them produced some genuinely impressive results in its early years. The serendipity of seeing an ad for something you had been thinking about proved very powerful in the early days of Facebook and the first generation of “retargeting” services.
But a look at Facebook’s ad-card rates shows that the novelty of this technique wears off fast. Facebook was founded on the premise that it could use its mounting dossier on your behavior to figure out how to sell you things faster than your natural defenses would repel its pitches. If that ideology was borne out, you’d expect to see the company’s cost-per-thousand ad rates climbing into the stratosphere. Instead, they’re damned close to the rate you’ll pay for regular, minimally targeted display advertising elsewhere.
The shrinking of the big data promise [Cory Doctorow/The Guardian]
(Image: Old ad for Holsum Bread , Joe Mabel, CC-BY-SA)
