Users * Ads per Second * Cost of Ad * Average Time on Site
Look at that formula and imagine your job is to make one of those numbers go up every year. For a while you can coast on getting more and more users, but for companies the size of Facebook, Twitter, and now TikTok, that’s harder and harder to do. We already talked about how more ads per second means people will leave your site, so you can’t go too crazy on that one. Sometimes a company will raise the cost of advertising, but that’s another place where if you raise the price too high you end up with no one running ads on your service because they can advertise more cheaply somewhere else.
But average time on site costs you very little, when you’re a social media site and pay nothing for your content. Sure, it’s hard to get people to stay on longer, but if you can get every user to spend just 2% more time on your app than they did last year, that’s 2% growth all by itself. And all you need is one good push notification, a little more horse girl in the feed, maybe a string of otter videos, and all of sudden your stock price goes up by a dollar. Or two. Or a hundred.
How do they get you to look at your phone more? By knowing more about you. Taste profiles, like I mentioned above, are a big part of it. A/B testing, essentially millions of little experiments to find out what people like, means that social sites are always getting better in a lot of little ways. And of course there’s massive computing power working constantly to figure out what content will get the most engagement, all to get you to spend more time scrolling and seeing ads. And what do you have defending you from that? A single squishy brain that gets a dopamine hit if I just whisper the word notification.
Of course, people aren’t choosing to work at Facebook and Snapchat and all of them in order to make your life worse. They just want a paycheck, and a nice job with benefits. And so they can do that, sure, maybe some teens feel a whole lot worse about themselves. And the company will make small modifications and try to help in little ways, but the one thing they’ll never ever do is make less money just to make users feel better.
Maybe you’re reading this and imagining I’m talking about other people. You might think you’re pretty good at not spending too much time on your phone, but on the whole social media sites are winning. We’re spending, on average, 1,300 hours online a year. That’s 54 straight, no-sleep days. That means about thirty percent of your waking hours are spent on social media. And in order for these companies to keep making more money, that number is only going to go up.
The richest corporations in history are using the best computer technology money can buy in an arms race to get you to spend less time living your life and more time looking at their apps. Happy Halloween!
Top image: God & Man
3 Unspoken Truths Of Social Media Nobody Wants To Acknowledge
Source: Pinoy Daily News
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