{"id":12319,"date":"2015-07-05T03:16:58","date_gmt":"2015-07-05T03:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/on-big-datas-shrinking-returns\/"},"modified":"2015-07-05T03:16:58","modified_gmt":"2015-07-05T03:16:58","slug":"on-big-datas-shrinking-returns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/on-big-datas-shrinking-returns\/","title":{"rendered":"On Big Data&#8217;s shrinking returns"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com\/post\/122845767840\/on-big-datas-shrinking-returns\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">mostlysignssomeportents<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<figure class=\"tmblr-full\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/66.media.tumblr.com\/14478ec2db54cc0761f1c2cab1397d35\/tumblr_inline_nqr8m7egzw1rkw4x1_540.jpg\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/figure>\n<p>In my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2015\/jun\/30\/the-shrinking-of-the-big-data-promise\">new Guardian column<\/a>, I point out that the big-data-driven surveillance business model is on the rocks.<\/p>\n<p>\nOnce upon a time, you could sell soap with a slogan like \u201cYou will be<br \/>\nclean,\u201d but we become resistant to ads. While Big Data initially<br \/>\ngenerated some promising sell-through results, these days, companies<br \/>\nlike Facebook are relying on non-surveillance techniques for their<br \/>\ngrowth.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Remember when Xynga\u2019s \u201csocial games\u201d like Farmville seemed to colonise<br \/>\nthe limbic systems of everyone you knew, stealing away their hours with a<br \/>\n fiendishly addictive game-mechanic? In short order, most of Xynga\u2019s<br \/>\nplayers grew inured to the game\u2019s temptations, leaving behind a rump of<br \/>\nespecially susceptible players who were not enough to sustain the game,<br \/>\nnor its makers\u2019 high-flying share price.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nLikewise, the \u201csurveillance business model\u201d of building up detailed<br \/>\nelectronic dossiers on internet users in order to predict what they want<br \/>\n to buy and how to sell it to them produced some genuinely impressive<br \/>\nresults in its early years. The serendipity of seeing an ad for<br \/>\nsomething you had been thinking about proved very powerful in the early<br \/>\ndays of Facebook and the first generation of \u201cretargeting\u201d services.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nBut a look at Facebook\u2019s ad-card rates shows that the novelty of this<br \/>\ntechnique wears off fast. Facebook was founded on the premise that it<br \/>\ncould use its mounting dossier on your behavior to figure out how to<br \/>\nsell you things faster than your natural defenses would repel its<br \/>\npitches. If that ideology was borne out, you\u2019d expect to see the<br \/>\ncompany\u2019s cost-per-thousand ad rates climbing into the stratosphere.<br \/>\nInstead, they\u2019re damned close to the rate you\u2019ll pay for regular,<br \/>\nminimally targeted display advertising elsewhere.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2015\/jun\/30\/the-shrinking-of-the-big-data-promise\"> The shrinking of the big data promise <\/a> [Cory Doctorow\/The Guardian]<\/p>\n<p>\n(<i>Image: <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Seattle_-_Our_Lady_of_Mount_Carmel_Center_03.jpg\">Old ad for Holsum Bread <\/a>, Joe Mabel, CC-BY-SA<\/i>)\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>mostlysignssomeportents: In my new Guardian column, I point out that the big-data-driven surveillance business model is on the rocks. Once upon a time, you could sell soap with a slogan like \u201cYou will be clean,\u201d but we become resistant to ads. While Big Data initially generated some promising sell-through results, these days, companies like Facebook [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-3cH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}