“Free” advice: “If you’re not the one paying, you’re not the customer”

A friend of mine gently mocked me recently for still having an AOL email address. I looked it up, and AOL has declined from a peak of nearly 27 million US subscribers in 2002 to under 3.5 million subscribers by mid-2011 while losing subscribers every single quarter. It’s amazing it’s still in business at all, but it supplies me with a free e-mail address that I don’t feel like changing.

I say “free,” but it’s clear that subscribers pay AOL’s bills by clicking on the various links all over the home page. Hence, it is almost entirely full of teaser headlines like “Key Iowa Poll Reveals New Favorite” with subheadings like “Results from the respected Des Moines Register poll show one GOP presidential hopeful with a strong lead over his rivals.” Now, in the same number of words AOL—less—could simply have said that Newt Gingrich had a ten-point lead in a Des Moines Register poll of Iowa Republicans, which would have been enough information for most of the people browsing the page, but then I guess fewer people would click on the link. To me, these headlines are a constant reminder that the service is not meant to cater to me, and therefore I never click on them, on principle. I actually don’t know how big Newt’s lead is, but I can live without knowing, or wait to read about it in my morning paper, which I pay for, and which will probably put Gingrich’s name in the headline and the poll number in the first sentence of the story.

I shouldn’t get all snooty, because I am the one using the service without paying money, so why should I balk at paying with my time or willingness to click on teaser headlines like “Does Image on Toast Remind You of Anyone?” or “Star’s Amazing Beatboxing Skills.” But the thing is, we often don’t have the choice. All of which brings me to Facebook, a “free” service that has been the subject of numerous complaints about violations of its users’ privacy. In a column posted November 30, Slate’s technology columnist Farhad Manjoo doesn’t so much excuse Facebook as tell users to avoid posting anything private. Fair enough, but the question is, why is Facebook so eager to nudge everyone toward broadly dissembling their information. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg may be correct in saying, essentially, that broad dissemination is the whole point of the service, but what must also be true is that more data distributed more broadly contributes to the bottom line.

The thing that spurred me to write the above is a comment below the article, posted a couple of days ago by someone called Lovey: “If you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold.” That’s the essential truth. Sometimes, for me, it would be nice to be able to pay for something and not be marketed or marketed to. The way I figure it, if a 30-second Super Bowl ad costs $3 million, there are 48 minutes of ads in a broadcast, and there are 100 million viewers, then a network could get the same revenue by charging each $2.88. In actuality, not all the ads cost that much, and 8 or 9 minutes are network promos, so it’d be less than $2.88. On the other hand, not everyone would be willing to pay that, and more than one person—in many cases many more than one person—can watch the same TV during a Super Bowl ad. If we assume that three people watch each TV during a Super Bowl, and allow that some people would stop watching, that could mean that the network would have to charge ten or fifteen dollars for a pay-per-view. But the network might save money without an ad department. And it still would only be five dollars per person, not bad for three hours of entertainment.

On a normal show, the ad rates can be anywhere from $5 to $50 per thousand viewers for a 30-second spot. Assuming 18 minutes of ads per hour, this translates to anywhere from less than a quarter to almost two dollars per hour per viewer. I do wonder what shows people would pay two dollars an hour to watch. Certainly charging for shows would change the nature of the audience. I’ve always figured there were some shows that people watched but wouldn’t pay a nickel for, while in other cases there are shows with passionate followings that have been cancelled because those followings were too small. Passion counts from the standpoint of viewers, but only eyeballs count for networks, because advertisers are their customers. I understand why advertising is such an easy sell for the public, but I’d like a way out, the way satellite radio and public radio give people ways out. (Or the way some iPhone/Android apps do, charging more for the ad-free version.) I’ve long been skeptical of advertising being a positive force in society, and I think that video advertising has the lowest ratio of useful information to image-making and sloganeering. But I now realize that another reason it bothers me more than print ads—radio ads falling in between, but I listen to public radio, or turn the station—is that it is more difficult to ignore. (Although I often do, by muting the television, or, increasingly, the computer.) I know most people accept the bargain of wasted time and annoyance in exchange for free things. But maybe they would get something better by being the customer, not the product. And with changes in technology making different payment methods possible, we should be able to have the choice.