The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [19]
The push for relevance gave rise to today’s Internet giants, and it is motivating businesses to accumulate ever more data about us and to invisibly tailor our online experiences on that basis. It’s changing the fabric of the Web. But as we’ll see, the consequences of personalization for how we consume news, make political decisions, and even how we think will be even more dramatic.
2
The User Is the Content
Everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life.
—John Dewey
The technology will be so good, it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.
—Eric Schmidt, Google CEO
Microsoft Building 1 in Mountain View, California, is a long, low, gunmetal gray hangar, and if it weren’t for the cars buzzing by behind it on Highway 101, you’d almost be able to hear the whine of ultrasonic security. On this Saturday in 2010, the vast expanses of parking lot were empty except for a few dozen BMWs and Volvos. A cluster of scrubby pine trees bent in the gusty wind.
Inside, the concrete-floored hallways were crawling with CEOs in jeans and blazers trading business cards over coffee and swapping stories about deals. Most hadn’t come far; the startups they represented were based nearby. Hovering over the cheese spread was a group of executives from data firms like Acxiom and Experian who had flown in from Arkansas and New York the night before. With fewer than a hundred people in attendance, the Social Graph Symposium nonetheless included the leaders and luminaries of the targeted-marketing field.
A bell rang, the group filed into breakout rooms, and one of the conversations quickly turned to the battle to “monetize content.” The picture, the group agreed, didn’t look good for newspapers.
The contours of the situation were clear to anyone paying attention: The Internet had delivered a number of mortal blows to the newspaper business model, any one of which might be fatal. Craigslist had made classified advertisements free, and $18 billion in revenue went poof. Nor was online advertising picking up the slack. An advertising pioneer once famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted—I just don’t know which half.” But the Internet turned that logic on its head—with click-through rates and other metrics, businesses suddenly knew exactly which half of their money went to waste. And when ads didn’t work as well as the industry had promised, advertising budgets were cut accordingly. Meanwhile, bloggers and freelance journalists started to package and produce news content for free, which pressured the papers to do the same online.
But what most interested the crowd in the room was the fact that the entire premise on which the news business had been built was changing, and the publishers weren’t even paying attention.
The New York Times had traditionally been able to command high ad rates because advertisers knew it attracted a premium audience—the wealthy opinion-making elite of New York and beyond. In fact, the publisher had a near monopoly on reaching that group—there were only a few other outlets that provided a direct feed into their homes (and out of their pocketbooks).
Now all that was changing. One executive in the marketing session was especially blunt. “The publishers are losing,” he said, “and they will lose, because they just don’t get it.”
Instead of taking out expensive advertisements in the New York Times, it was now possible to track that elite cosmopolitan readership using data acquired from Acxiom or BlueKai. This was, to say the least, a game changer in the business of news. Advertisers no longer needed to pay the New York Times to reach Times readers: they could target them wherever they