We all think of ourselves as customers of the various websites. We almost feel initialed to a free or a freemium model for sites we use. We all assume that ad-supported model works and it should be pay for usage of the sites.
As online usage continues to grow, so does the competition for online ad dollars. Thus the sites are increasingly trying to make ads more “effective” and “attractive” for the “Ad buyers”. The way this is being done is by making ads more relevant and appealing to the web surfers in hopes to get more clicks. The way these websites can make the ads more relevant to the users are by sharing the information about the users with the advertisers. this is done via cookies. WSJ recently had an interesting article about how some of well known sites use 100s of cookies each to track the browsing habits of its users.
Lets quickly review the definitions of a product and customer.
Product: something that is marketed or sold as a commodity
customer: one that purchases a commodity or service
This brings us to the topic of this blog post. From the website's perspective the customers are the companies that are buying ads on its sites. The product is the data that they are selling - our personal data, our profile.
In order to complete in the market place, they need to improve their product. They improve it by coming up with new and innovating ideas of collecting increasingly more and more personal data. Facebook makes an very interesting case study.
Just think about the things facebook has added over the years. We think we are the customers of facebook and these new features are added to serve us. Once we see the real customers, we see that these are pretty amazing and well thought attempts to improve the product. The very popular like button, the facebook connect, now defunct facebook beacon, share via facebook, and now facebook messages. using our personal profiles they already know where we live, went to school, work, what what we like, who we communicate with, and now what we communictae about. This will create an unparallel product for the real customer
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