TLDR: companies will likely shaft you as the market value for your individual dataset isn't that much, companies derive value by aggregating data over a large number of consumers.
It's an externality. The harm to you and society from being tracked and data-mined is worse than the profit that companies make from that data. Even if they paid you all their profit it's still bad. And in reality they would find a way to pay even less than that.
The only reason I'll pay you a dollar for your data is that I'll make 2 dollars selling you shit you wouldn't have bought otherwise using it. And for me to make 2 dollars, you need to buy 20 dollars worth of shit. Shit you didn't actually want or need.
Very cynical take assuming retail is zero-sum. It could also be helping you find the products you need at an opportune time, increasing the value for all parties. Or based on purchase patterns, they're able to stock inventory more accurately based on predicted purchases, and save on storage and transport.
That's fair. But how much of advertising actually informs you of a new and useful product? Vs how much just tries to upsell you, convince you you want something you didn't want 5 minutes ago, or push brands that add nothing substancice?
I know I'm a cynical uni bomber type, I don't expect anyone to 100% agree or for adverts to disappear. But dwhen was the last time an advert actually informed you of a product you didn't know about and would have been interested in buying if it weren't advertised to make it so?
Most modern advertising is a less than zero sum game for the consumer.
I would say yesterday, potentially. Saw an ad for totally watertight running shoes, which was not something I thought existed. Haven't looked into the product enough to buy them, but it's a good bet I will, and they would be of great utility to me.
This is never an argument for unsolicited advertising and user tracking, though.
I.e. you could have achieved the same by explaining your needs to some shop or service. Just tell them that you are a runner and want relevant ads in your mailbox. No need to tell them about the rest of your life.
Except all the multibillion dollar advertising mega corporations happen to sell directly to the people who want to affect your behavior to their benefit.
You could argue that it just happens to also be to your benefit by chance, but that's certainly not where the incentives lie.
By comparison, companies like consumer reports, which instead directly sell you information to influence your behavior to your benefit are tiny. The advertising industry is nearly a trillion dollar industry -- if a large amount of that value is going to the consumer why hasn't there been massive innovation in selling to it directly to the consumer?
GP's comment about selling us shit we don't want/need is a hard pill to swallow. It's highly counterintuitive and demeaning to our sense of agency -- just like so many results in modern psychology.
But I think that view also misses the bigger picture twice. First, because while the consumer-producer relationship is positive sum and that's the whole reason it exists, pricing is not. If advertising makes it easier to connect with a product you want, then the price can be raised. We should think about how advertising makes the things we want more expensive.
But second, I think we should also think about how the relationship of advertiser to producer may not be positive sum. Producers compete with each other in a fashion that isn't positive sum, and advertisers sell to all producers. That's an arms race. I can't effectively start a business without using advertising because all my competitors use advertising. Advertising doesn't account for a trillion dollars in demand per year -- it just siphons it from producers by selling them the same arms they sell to their competitors.
>The advertising industry is nearly a trillion dollar industry -- if a large amount of that value is going to the consumer why hasn't there been massive innovation in selling to it directly to the consumer?
But a hefty part of that value does come from selling it to the consumer, as long as he or she is interested. Advertising, and especially online advertising have both "democratized" greatly as the ad industry has grown over recent decades, and smaller business, so many of them belonging to consumers in other contexts, use this same consumer data to try benefitting their own bottom line.
> It could also be helping you find the products you need at an opportune time, increasing the value for all parties.
This always comes up. But perhaps we should also ask the opposite question: what if we banned all ads, how would that affect overconsumption? It could theoretically be the best thing that ever happened to the planet.
That's a fine question. I don't know you. You might well be impervious to advertising. And if so, you'll gain a dollar.
But I know the average person is NOT impervious to advertising. Quite the opposite, since ww2 billion dollar companies have risen based entirely on the fact most people are very susceptible to advertising. And every year, advertising gets smarter, more specific, more common, more aggressive, more tailored etc.
So you'll have to ask yourself: are you smarter than the average bear?
Or rather, are you smarter than Googles billion dollar bear hunting machine designed to catch bears that are too smart to be caught by any other bear catching machine? And are you smarter than it is, even though you gave it all your data for a dollar? And instead of a dollar, you settled for free email and tailored autoprediction to save you typing...
Sometimes the smartest thing to do is admit you're not THAT smart. I know I'm not.
The entire reason advertising exists is to subvert your conscious assessment of what you need, and when you do buy something you "need", you buy the right brand.
It seems highly unlikely you will make your money on selling people things they don't want OR need, I mean you can certainly make money selling things people don't need but that is because they want it.
I guess I have at times bought something I did not want or need, but that was because my wife or kids wanted or needed it.
