The game is all about controlling users, gaining rights in a standard take-it-or-leave-it "bargain." These companies rarely sell you anything just for revenue. It's always a play to aggregate data, aggregate users, create network effects and dominate their emergent properties.
There's usually no value to data, for example, unless its aggregated. I think consumers might need to "unionize^" in some fashion. It may not resemble a trade union at all, but consumer rights, increasingly, resemble labour rights issues.
.
Youtube is a great example. There are multiple classes of users/consumers: watchers, youtubers, advertisers. All of them are completely expendable, and youtube's relationship with all of them is 100% take-it-or-leave it. No one is important enough to speak to the boss.
It's actually not hard to see how youtubers would unionize. It might even resembles a labour union quite a lot. If enough youtubers users strike, for example...
Advertisers I dunno. In some industries/segments, adwords and FB are basically a tax. The norm is spending >10% of your gross on advertising. OTH... it's hard to see them being a factor.
I don't even have a mental model of how an organized usership might look, but data aggregation probably needs to be a part of it.
The game is all about controlling users, gaining rights in a standard take-it-or-leave-it "bargain." These companies rarely sell you anything just for revenue. It's always a play to aggregate data, aggregate users, create network effects and dominate their emergent properties.
There's usually no value to data, for example, unless its aggregated. I think consumers might need to "unionize^" in some fashion. It may not resemble a trade union at all, but consumer rights, increasingly, resemble labour rights issues. .
Youtube is a great example. There are multiple classes of users/consumers: watchers, youtubers, advertisers. All of them are completely expendable, and youtube's relationship with all of them is 100% take-it-or-leave it. No one is important enough to speak to the boss.
It's actually not hard to see how youtubers would unionize. It might even resembles a labour union quite a lot. If enough youtubers users strike, for example...
Advertisers I dunno. In some industries/segments, adwords and FB are basically a tax. The norm is spending >10% of your gross on advertising. OTH... it's hard to see them being a factor.
I don't even have a mental model of how an organized usership might look, but data aggregation probably needs to be a part of it.