In a post looking of the recent Beacon rollout (and rollback), Siva highlights one of the key differences between the Google targeting system, and the one that Facebook is building: Google’s is invisible.
Well, for one thing, the Facebook ad revenue strategy is an attempt to leverage personal preferences with more accuracy and influence than Google can. Google can profile most users by IP number and many users by personal identifiers (if they log in to Google to use GMail or some other service). But it’s an imperfect profiling system. Using search history as a proxy for preferences is rough. You need years of data to do accurate profiling and ad targeting. Facebook thinks it can do better.
Of course, there was massive protest to [Facebook's] move. The surveillance/profiling/publicity function was way obvious. Google’s surveillance/profiling function is discreet to the point of invisibility. That’s its brilliance and virtue. Your preferences are between you and Google (or so we are led to believe).
The problem with the Adwords/Beacon comparison is, of course, that Beacon is meant to be inherently social whereas Adwords is really meant to be inherently private. Who else needs to know that you’re searching for Neti Pots? That’s not the point.
Welcome to our community! If you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed!
{ 0 comments… add one now }