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No they don't. People sold ads profitably for hundreds of years without any sort of surveillance, and many people continue to do so today. If it were impossible

No they don't. People sold ads profitably for hundreds of years without any sort of surveillance, and many people continue to do so today. If it were impossible to make money just selling ads (I wish it were) then billboards and bus stop posters wouldn't exist. You can even make money on the internet this way: www.ethicalads.io. Twitter also has an enormous advantage: even if they don't know anything about you, they know a whole bunch about whoever posted the tweets you're reading. They could do a lot of targeting by just looking at the content you're viewing.

jdminhbg 3y ago
> People sold ads profitably for hundreds of years without any sort of surveillance, and many people continue to do so today. If it were impossible to make money just selling ads (I wish it were) then billboards and bus stop posters Billboards and bus stop posters are cheaper to run than Twitter.com is, so making much less money is ok. The whole reason Twitter has always been unprofitable but Facebook/Meta is a trillion-dollar public company is that FB figured out how profitably identify users and serve them ads and Twitter didn't.
- burkaman 3y ago
  I agree with you, it is unquestionably more profitable to spy on people and then sell them ads. My point is that you can still make money without the spying part, and there is no reason for us to accept that the two always have to be bundled. If you can't make a profit without spying on people then your business model sucks. The fact that you might be able to make more money by being less ethical is not very interesting, that's true of almost anyone.
abracadaniel 3y ago
Network television is enormously expensive and entirely paid by ads without knowledge of the viewers. Instead they make assumptions based on surveys of demographics and manage to be very profitable. I wonder if you could make a comparison of ratings of a TV show to active users of a website. For example: is Twitter the equivalent of daytime TV, or multiple series-finale-of-Friends per day. *edit: it looks like they are the equivalent of 0.8 Friends finale / day. 41m daily active users vs 51m viewers of the Friends finale.

jdminhbg 3y ago

> People sold ads profitably for hundreds of years without any sort of surveillance, and many people continue to do so today. If it were impossible to make money just selling ads (I wish it were) then billboards and bus stop posters Billboards and bus stop posters are cheaper to run than Twitter.com is, so making much less money is ok. The whole reason Twitter has always been unprofitable but Facebook/Meta is a trillion-dollar public company is that FB figured out how profitably identify users and serve them ads and Twitter didn't.

burkaman 3y ago
I agree with you, it is unquestionably more profitable to spy on people and then sell them ads. My point is that you can still make money without the spying part, and there is no reason for us to accept that the two always have to be bundled. If you can't make a profit without spying on people then your business model sucks. The fact that you might be able to make more money by being less ethical is not very interesting, that's true of almost anyone.

abracadaniel 3y ago

Network television is enormously expensive and entirely paid by ads without knowledge of the viewers. Instead they make assumptions based on surveys of demographics and manage to be very profitable. I wonder if you could make a comparison of ratings of a TV show to active users of a website. For example: is Twitter the equivalent of daytime TV, or multiple series-finale-of-Friends per day. *edit: it looks like they are the equivalent of 0.8 Friends finale / day. 41m daily active users vs 51m viewers of the Friends finale.