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?
First the learn about who you are so they can provide accurate demographics to target with ads. Advertiser’s pay heaps to be able to hyper specifically target ads.
Then they scape messages and information from their uses to build datasets which they sell.
Then there is premium subscriptions for business accounts.
In Asia they have in app shopping where the social media site gets a cut of every purchase.
Ads and selling your personal data. In twitter’s case elon musk also uses it to influence politics and amplify his own opinion.
Some also have subscriptions.
This is 100% correct but just wanted to say when I see an admin account with the little red A. I always think it’s the Scarlett Letter and giggle.
Ads are a bigger business than you might expect. Get enough eyeballs in one place and brands will be tripping over themselves to give you money just to mention their name. Take the superbowl for example. It’s usually the most viewed event every year in the US, so naturally there is a tradition of advertisers pulling out all the stops and making high-budget bombastic commercials for that specific occasion. You can imagine how attractive it is for brands to want to put their ads on big social media sites, where psychological tricks are used to capture as much attention as possible at all times, instead of just once per year.
Then there’s the user data angle. The big sites all have millions of users who constantly give away personal information without even being prompted, and that makes it really easy for the companies who run them to analyze what makes each user tick and serve ads to the people who are most likely to click on them. This elevates the rate brands are willing to pay even further.
Those two things, along with a suite of anti-competitive practices, are enough to get sites to the point of being mostly profitable. Venture capital and hype-based market speculation get them the rest of the way.
Attention. Ads are shown to the viewer, engagement with content tracks your likes and dislikes to sell to data brokers, inpost sponsors let the creator make money directly same with affiliate links, engaging with creators on multiple plstforms.
