Eyes, Ears and Data

Google recently opened a new and enormous and Google-esque, massive office in Chicago, which includes an olympic sized swimming pool for ya know, all the olympians they employ. As Anderson points out in "Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business", Google's services such as their search engine and mail service are free, so clearly this $0.00 business model must be working for some. So how do they make money you ask?  

Advertising! About 89% of Google's $66 billion (yes, billion, with a "B") in revenue came from advertising.

Unfortunately, journalism has become a commodity, and we have become entitled to content. Yet, we don't value the hours of work that go into finding data, interviewing sources, and crafting a piece of work. Therefore, since people don't want to pay for content, advertisers swoop in to save the day.

My dad always said to me "Hija, en los Estados Unidos nada es gratis" which translates to "in the U.S nothing is free".  This can be applied to the internet and this trend towards $0.00. What is in fact selling like hotcakes is data, eyes, and ears. My media professor Lisa Dobias once told my class "your eyes and ears are worth more than what you could physically pay a company". Those impressions and views that we provide advertisers fund the content that we enjoy, or otherwise we would be having to empty our pockets. Additionally, the data that is collected from various platforms is extremely valuable in order to make more targeted advertisement which is more efficient and useful

This is why I find it so strange when people complain about those "stupid" advertisements in front of a Youtube video, or on Hulu. That same sense of entitlement that makes people not want to pay for The New York Times is the same one makes people angry in these instances.

With that anger present people install adblocking services, which in turn hurt the publishers of the content we want to consume because 1. we are not paying money for the service and 2. we are preventing them from obtaining their advertising dollars, which fund their content.

This vicious cycle in which "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive" puts us in a difficult predicament. Ideally, we would all just revert back to paying for the quality content we receive, but unfortunately I believe we are too far gone. There are going to have to be drastic changes to the way we consume quality content.