Advertising platforms sell analysed targeting promises, not raw data

Evidence

Rather than exploiting free labour, the position taken here is that advertising platforms appropriate data as a raw material. The activities of users and institutions, if they are recorded and transformed into data, become a raw material that can be refined and used in a variety of ways by platforms. With advertising platforms in particular, revenue is generated through the extraction of data from users’ activities online, from the analysis of those data, and from the auctioning of ad space to advertisers. This involves achieving two processes. First, advertising platforms need to monitor and record online activities. The more users interact with a site, the more information can be collected and used. Equally, as users wander around the internet, they are tracked via cookies and other means, and these data become ever more extensive and valuable to advertisers. There is a convergence of surveillance and profit making in the digital economy, which leads some to speak of ‘surveillance capitalism’. Key to revenues, however, is not just the collection of data, but also the analysis of data. Advertisers are interested less in unorganised data and more in data that give them insights or match them to likely consumers. These are data that have been worked on. They have had some process applied to them, whether through the skilled labour of a data scientist or the automated labour of a machine-learning algorithm. What is sold to advertisers is therefore not the data themselves (advertisers do not receive personalised data), but rather the promise that Google’s software will adeptly match an advertiser with the correct users when needed. — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 55

Categorization

• XREF: The core rival formulation to Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism: raw-material appropriation plus analysis rather than behavioural surplus alone. — connects to: Platform profit comes from commodifying user data by-products rather than selling ads — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 40; Surveillance platforms extract behavioral data from users and sell predictions to advertisers — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 297; Behavioral data shifted from improving service to reading users’ minds for ad targeting. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 244 (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Precise definition of what the platform actually sells — the matching promise, not personalised data — which distinguishes the model from simplistic extraction accounts.
• ADDENDUM: Parallels the grafting piece’s infrastructure focus: like trees, data only become valuable through a refining/processing layer that the platform owns.

Related

• Surveillance platforms extract behavioral data from users and sell predictions to advertisers (similarity 0.87)
• Google’s data shifted from improving services to generating ad revenue (similarity 0.86)
• Google sells fabricated predictions, not raw personal data (similarity 0.84)
• Behavioral data shifted from improving service to reading users’ minds for ad targeting. (similarity 0.84)
• Google’s early ad-matching patents replaced guesswork with predictive behavioral data (similarity 0.83)
• Platform profit comes from commodifying user data by-products rather than selling ads (similarity 0.83)
• Google shifted advertising from matching keywords to targeting individual users (similarity 0.83)
• Facebook’s data advantage enabled unprecedented advertiser nanotargeting (similarity 0.82)
• Platform profits come from harvesting user attention and selling it back to advertisers (similarity 0.82)
• Platforms extract data as a form of unpaid payment from users (similarity 0.81)
• Digital platforms hijack life into data whose insights are sold back to us (similarity 0.80)
• Platform competition shifts from price to data as the competitive criterion (similarity 0.80)
• Users are raw material suppliers whose behavior yields predictive products indifferent to their fate (similarity 0.79)
• A platform’s structural position gives it privileged access to record interactions (similarity 0.79)
• Network effects embed monopoly tendencies directly into platform structure (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Platform profit comes from commodifying user data by-products rather than selling ads #expands (0.75) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 40
• Surveillance platforms extract behavioral data from users and sell predictions to advertisers #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 297
• Google’s early ad-matching patents replaced guesswork with predictive behavioral data #exemplifies (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 245
• Facebook’s data advantage enabled unprecedented advertiser nanotargeting #expands (0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1006
• Behavioral data shifted from improving service to reading users’ minds for ad targeting. #expands (0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 244
• Platform competition shifts from price to data as the competitive criterion #expands (0.70) — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 81