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>Companies that make a product that's fun to use, but have never earned a dime from me and probably never will. > Members: Facebook, Twitter, and Pandora. Hm,

• michael_dorfman 16y ago
  This. People are so accustomed to thinking of themselves as consumers, that it is difficult for some to fathom that they are often the product. A general rule of thumb: if you're not paying for it, somebody else is-- and what they are paying for just may be you.
  • extension 16y ago
    Somebody else is paying to convince you to buy something from them. If you aren't buying, they'll eventually figure it out and the whole scheme falls apart. Advertising has been around for a long time and consumers know how it works. Consumer spending is still a vital part of the food chain.
• rpeden 16y ago
  Right, but what if that attention becomes less valuable as time goes on? We're already at the point where many people don't even see ads on sites like Facebook. The ads are just background noise. In five to ten years, the kids born in the mid-90s who have never known life without the internet will start entering the workforce in large numbers. What happens if they're so desensitized to online advertising that they don't even notice it, for the most part? Will companies that derive most of their revenue from easy-to-ignore advertising find that they've hit a wall in terms of being able to derive revenue from the 'attention' of a large number of people?
• cruise02 16y ago
  Exactly. Add Google to the list of companies that have "never made a dime" from me too.