Surveillance-based mobile advertising made Facebook among the largest companies worldwide

Evidence

Surveillance revenues flowed fast and furiously, and the market lavishly rewarded the corporation’s shareholders. By 2017, the Financial Times hailed the company’s 71 percent earnings surge with the headline “Facebook: The Mark of Greatness” as Facebook’s market capitalization rose to just under 500 billion, with 2 billion average monthly active users. Facebook ranked seventh in one important tally of the top 100 companies in the first quarter of 2017, when just a year earlier it hadn’t figured anywhere in the top 100. Advertising, primarily mobile, accounted for nearly every dollar of the company’s revenue in the second quarter of 2017: 9.2 billion of a total $9.3 billion and a 47 percent increase over the prior year. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 503

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Facebook’s data advantage enabled unprecedented advertiser nanotargeting — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1006; Targeted advertising was foundational to surveillance capitalism’s origins — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 202; Surveillance platforms extract behavioral data from users and sell predictions to advertisers — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 297 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Facebook’s data advantage enabled unprecedented advertiser nanotargeting #expands (0.90) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1006
• Targeted advertising was foundational to surveillance capitalism’s origins #corroborates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 202
• Surveillance platforms extract behavioral data from users and sell predictions to advertisers #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 297