What do people who own social media platforms gain from it and how? Where do they get the revenue from? I know that ads make up some part of it but is the revenue generated from ads enough?

  • dan@upvote.au
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    8 days ago

    selling your personal data

    The major tech companies like Google, Facebook, etc don’t sell user data. That’s a common misconception. The data is what makes the company valuable - nobody else has it. It wouldn’t make sense for them to sell it, because they’d lose their competitive advantage over other companies.

    Advertisers can target ads based on the data, but the advertiser never actually sees user data.

    • Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      Yea, I mostly meant selling your data to advertisers, but in the case of big companies the ad platform is ofcourse internal.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      8 days ago

      It’s not a misconception, it’s just how people say what’s happening. They’re basically selling their ability to make a profile of you based on your data. It’s just colloquially said as “selling your data.”