You Are Not a Customer of Facebook, But Their Cattle

People think they are the customers of social media.

This error is not only extended but renewed by the belief that social networks exist to serve us.

But we are not the customers of social media. We are, ultimately, their cattle.

I know this may sound painful for your ears. Below I will make my point with some data discovered by using Facebook ads.

To understand how you are being manipulated is painful, but also liberating. (If you read the most recent book from Cal Newport, you know that).

A cow is not the customer of a farmer

The rancher takes care of his cattle, so they provide him with milk (or fresh meat if they are part of the unlucky). To him, the utility of a cow is attached to her capacity to provide what he needs. The farmer gives food and shelter to his herd in exchange for the economic benefits he will reap from the animals.

That is exactly how Facebook and most social media platforms treat us.

Instead of providing Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey with butter, we give them our eyeballs. Hours and hours of attention in exchange for the cheap entertainment of their infinite feeds while we scroll down and down.

To confirm this point is enough to answer a simple question:

What is the source of the 70.7 billion dollars revenue that Facebook made in 2019?

Advertisement. More specifically, 69.7 billion were generated by ads.

98.5% of all the money Facebook made last year was from corporations subtly infiltrating their ads in your timeline. Sometimes even disguised as real content.

No human on the planet has more than 24 hours of eyeball attention available. Corporations know that, and they fight fiercely to guarantee the biggest share of your time.

First were the placards and luminous announcements, times-square style. Later came television, now gradually replaced by the internet and social media as the war field of announcers.

Facebook packs your eyeball time in an industrial fashion and sells it in packages of 1000 units. Each unit is called an “impression” and it means 3 seconds of a user eyeball.

1000 units (3 seconds of attention) from Americans of the upper-income social substrate cost, by the time I write this text, around 3.38 dollars.

The same 1000 units, but from Brazilian undergrads costs 75 cents of a dollar.

An equivalent amount of eyeball time from non-English speaking Peruvian residents costs less than 9 cents per 1000 units.

(I know that because I explored the possibilities of using Facebook to promote my first and second book after launching).

If you read one more time at the beginning of this article, knowing the prices of your eyeballs, you will start to understand how Facebook works.

This attention-exploration mechanics explains why all efforts — and here I am literally meaning all efforts — of Facebook and major social media are for 2 reasons:

1 — Maximize the amount of time you spend on their website.

More specifically, the amount of time your eyes are going down the timeline or feed. Remember what is the product that Facebook sells: the time of your eyeballs, divided into blocks of 3 seconds. It is based on how long users spent scrolling that many social media executives are rewarded. They want you to waste more of your life on the news feed.

2 — Maximize the amount of information they have about you, so they can charge more from companies wanting to buy very specific eyeball time.

Example: I recently programmed an ad on Facebook that should only be shown to people between 28 and 59 years old, with relatives living abroad, who have plans to start a company and recently traveled to Europe. How Facebook discovered all this about each person is not hard to imagine.

The Facebook algorithm divides us into three major groups, according to our online behavior:

Engagement, audience, or conversion.

When you create an Ad, you select which group you want to explore.

If you spend most of your social media time commenting, liking or sharing posts, probably they packed you into the Engagement category.

If you accept streaming suggestions or click in a considerable number of ads, they will throw you in the audience group.

If you click in an ad and effectively buy a product or sign-up to a service, then they will categorize you as conversion.

Companies will select which group they want to buy, and pay accordingly to Facebook to open the gates to your eyes and brain.

Announcers are the customers

To be honest, what Facebook is doing is not new. TV channels were doing something similar for decades when researching their audience and selling commercial-time to announcers.

The difference here is that machine learning algorithms turned social media into a highly efficient tool for customer segmentation — by gathering all personal data you willingly give them in form of likes and follows — and to sell specific customer's attention.

This is valuable to announcers since they now can target the public that is more profitable for their business model.

Facebook purpose is to increase the production of what they sell (time of your eyeballs) and the quality of what they sell, meaning audience information. By doing this, they can pack this very segmented audience to sponsors.

This is why they employ some of the most brilliant behavioral psychologists on the planet, which work together with their design department to get you hooked.

Those red numbers in your notifications make you anxious to check your feed. All the push notifications arriving on your phone informing that someone marked, mentioned, or simply posted something you should see. The selection of content, made by their artificial intelligence mechanisms, selecting what has the highest probability of grab your attention and makes you lose track of time.

All that is to get you hooked

When you are hooked, you spend more of your life on their website, speeding the manufacturing of eyeball time to be packed and sold to corporations.

During all that process, you were just cattle being milked for your eyes.

Author: Levi Borba, founder of Colligere Expat Consultancy, former RM specialist for the world´s greatest airline, writer of the books Moving Out, Living Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity and Budget Travelers, Digital Nomads & Expats: The Ultimate Guide. He is also the founder of the channels Small Business Hacks and Vida no Leste Europeu.