AOL monetized user data before Facebook and Google did
Evidence
Years before Facebook or Google undertook a similar mission, AOL’s business team also began coming up with ways to cash in on the “big data” they had collected: that is, the addresses, phone numbers, and credit card numbers of millions of users. The walled garden, by its nature, was already giving companies direct access to users and some of their information; now AOL also began allowing them, for instance, to insert ads into emails (making the service, in effect, a spammer of its own users). But there were more audacious plans still. AOL sold its users’ mailing addresses to direct mail companies. It was going to sell the phone numbers to telemarketers as well, shamelessly describing these maneuvers in its terms of service as a membership benefit. Alas, an inadvertent leak of the plan prompted a user revolt and the telemarketing part was abandoned. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 737
Categorization
- XREF: Direct antecedent of the modern surveillance capitalism data-harvesting model that Wu describes elsewhere; echoes Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism thesis. — connects to: An internet pioneer presciently enacted total surveillance culture before Facebook existed — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 157; Stricter EU privacy laws did not slow Facebook and Google growth — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1553; Platform profit comes from commodifying user data by-products rather than selling ads — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 40 (+2 more)
- SEED: Essay angle: how AOL’s early ‘big data’ monetization — including the plan to sell phone numbers framed as a ‘membership benefit’ — presaged and normalized today’s platform data extraction norms.
Broader Connections
- Platform profit comes from commodifying user data by-products rather than selling ads
#corroborates(0.75) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 40 - Corporate data-as-asset rhetoric reframes untapped user data as a trillion-dollar revenue source
#complicates(0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 506 - Investor pressure forced Google and Facebook to intensify advertising against their original ideals.
#qualifies(0.70) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1086