Privacy concerns seem to be all the rage these days. Facebook, attacked in recent months by privacy advocates, has swung into reactive mode, largely abandoning their advertising beacon strategy and installing more controls over who can access and view a user’s personal information. Driving this trend are the adults who are joining social networks in droves. These mature users have a much more pronounced need for privacy than youngsters.
We believe the privacy backlash continues to gain momentum for two central reasons. First, most popular social networking sites were designed, engineered and perpetuated by youngsters themselves. Their designs have reflected their own value systems which are often in opposition to that of adults. The second is reflected in the ongoing reliance on antiquated forms of monetization in social networks which rely on CPM-based page views to generate income. As a result, deleting user data and limiting page views is antithetical to their very sustenance. The result is increasingly less control over one’s end-to-end data set.
What is so different about an adult that makes the need for privacy so pressing? While complex in origin, we believe it boils down to a fairly simple difference between kids and adults: the need to protect reputation equity. One might argue that kids are too young to have developed reputation equity as it takes years to establish domain and/or career expertise.
As adults, we’ve spent both energy and resource creating our personal brands and need to know that those brands can be effectively managed and protected in both online and offline contexts. As adults we don’t want everyone to know everything we do. We want them to know what we want them to know and nothing more.
Furthermore, the goal of sites like MySpace and Facebook is to generate as many page views as possible. These page views can then be sold to advertisers in the form of CPM-based online ad buys. Deleting a users profile decreases the available inventory for the site and therefore works against their interest. In addition valuations have been driven skyward by statistics around page views, registered users and monthly visits which further perpetuates the cycle of dependency on all data, good and bad.
The results of a large search on MySpace, for example, will turn up dozens of user profiles that have been inactive for six months or longer. Active or not, these profiles are still regarded as viable advertising inventory. A short term win will almost assuredly result in long term disappointment for user, advertiser and MySpace alike.
In contrast to this, Fuego Nation allows users complete control over their online personas. We monetize only active, engaged users. So, if a user isn’t active for a period of three months, we delete them from our system- entirely. The entire concept behind Fuego Nation was predicated on providing actionable data for both member and advertiser alike and to be actionable members must be engaged in the community.
We don’t have a page view ad model but an active user, sponsorship model. The key, then, is to provide context and environment for people to WANT to be engaged over a long period of time. If a user’s activity lapses, we want to address the problem of engagement not perpetuate a poor product experience by engaging ghosts of data past.
Posts Tagged ‘Facebook Beacon’
We believe the privacy backlash continues to gain momentum for two central reasons. First, most popular social networking sites were designed, engineered and perpetuated by youngsters themselves. Their designs have reflected their own value systems which are often in opposition to that of adults. The second is reflected in the ongoing reliance on antiquated forms of monetization in social networks which rely on CPM-based page views to generate income. As a result, deleting user data and limiting page views is antithetical to their very sustenance. The result is increasingly less control over one’s end-to-end data set.
What is so different about an adult that makes the need for privacy so pressing? While complex in origin, we believe it boils down to a fairly simple difference between kids and adults: the need to protect reputation equity. One might argue that kids are too young to have developed reputation equity as it takes years to establish domain and/or career expertise.
As adults, we’ve spent both energy and resource creating our personal brands and need to know that those brands can be effectively managed and protected in both online and offline contexts. As adults we don’t want everyone to know everything we do. We want them to know what we want them to know and nothing more.
Furthermore, the goal of sites like MySpace and Facebook is to generate as many page views as possible. These page views can then be sold to advertisers in the form of CPM-based online ad buys. Deleting a users profile decreases the available inventory for the site and therefore works against their interest. In addition valuations have been driven skyward by statistics around page views, registered users and monthly visits which further perpetuates the cycle of dependency on all data, good and bad.
The results of a large search on MySpace, for example, will turn up dozens of user profiles that have been inactive for six months or longer. Active or not, these profiles are still regarded as viable advertising inventory. A short term win will almost assuredly result in long term disappointment for user, advertiser and MySpace alike.
In contrast to this, Fuego Nation allows users complete control over their online personas. We monetize only active, engaged users. So, if a user isn’t active for a period of three months, we delete them from our system- entirely. The entire concept behind Fuego Nation was predicated on providing actionable data for both member and advertiser alike and to be actionable members must be engaged in the community.
We don’t have a page view ad model but an active user, sponsorship model. The key, then, is to provide context and environment for people to WANT to be engaged over a long period of time. If a user’s activity lapses, we want to address the problem of engagement not perpetuate a poor product experience by engaging ghosts of data past.