Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time - our 'social graphs' - into money for others.

The easiest way to figure out who the customer is in an online space is to figure out who is paying for the thing. Usually, the people paying are the customers. So on Facebook, the people paying are marketers. That makes them the customers. And it means we are the product being delivered to those customers.

People say Facebook connects the world. Facebook has 5,000 Ph.D.s that think about how to make you click on ads you don't want to see. Their business model is about something that most people would not perceive as making the world better.

Facebook needs to maintain its vise-like grip on our attention to become a conduit of not only advertising but also commerce, so that it can take a cut of everything.

The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we - and the young, particularly - spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation.

Most of Mark Zuckerberg's income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative - after all, everybody is on Facebook these days.

If you are interacting with anything on your phone or your computer, it is specifically designed to collect as much data about you as possible, so that that can then be monetized.

Microsoft could help Facebook with one of the biggest challenges, namely monetizing its traffic without reducing the user's experience. It's obvious that Microsoft needs traffic and Facebook needs search.

Personally, I'd love to see more social media firms develop business models that aren't reliant on advertising. If you're a social media firm selling ads, your goal is to get people to interrupt what they're doing all day long so they come and stare at your service as much as possible.

Google is omniscient of what people search for and do. Facebook has over a billion subscribers, meaning Mark Zuckerberg has personal information about one in every seven people on Earth. U.S.A., Brazil, Mexico, India and Indonesia are at the top of that list.

As late as 2007, Facebook was still trying to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up. An advertising space seemed to be the obvious answer, but how that would tap into the massive value of the personal data uploaded to the company every day remained a puzzle.

We're not advertisement-driven, so we don't need personal databases.

For technology companies, information about what people do online is extremely valuable - it can be used to sell targeted advertising or sold to data clearinghouses.

Corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, all of these large companies, are making tens or hundreds of billions of dollars off of monetising people's data.

When Facebook launched, it dove headfirst into a brave new world. No one knew that the cost of connecting people all over the world for ad revenue was eventually going to be Cambridge Analytica.

Here is one iron law of the Internet: a social network's emphasis on monetizing its product is directly proportional to its users' loss of privacy.

There is critical mass with high-speed Internet connections, so video is a good user experience. And that means there can be critical mass for advertisers.

Mahalo's business model is advertising. Yahoo, Google, Ask, AOL and MSN are all advertising-based. So I don't see anything wrong with advertising-based search.

We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances.

I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.

I can't say the advertising model is obsolete yet but it doesn't make a lot of sense in the long range.

Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are all 'User First, Brands Second' services. The brands are all over these services now. But for the most part, these services didn't do much to bring them. The engaged users did.

Advertising is very simple in a lot of ways. Advertisers go where the users go, and users are choosing to spend a lot more time online.

I am responsible for creating and overseeing the future products that make up Google Advertising.

Google is a business that gets paid when users want to see - want to click on - the ad. If we show ads that no one wants to see, we don't generate revenue.