Someone appears to be pouring enormous energy and effort into a data collection project aimed at building personality profiles from social media interaction…again. If I have access to dozens or even hundreds of “affiliated” pages the potential reach becomes vast. I can then collect and analyze their responses to my posts. Facebook’s APIs allow me to pull some aggregate data but other methods let me scrape the profiles of people who interact with my posts. In the social media industry, data is the product. It’s tough to tell where the money’s coming from because no one in this business would respond to inquiries, but there’s a likely answer. This multi-billion dollar industry has to be getting revenue somewhere else. For that matter, they rarely write much either. Rarely are the blogs specifically selling anything on any scale. These social media and blog ads don’t appear to generate much revenue. Bloggers get a cut of the ad revenue, but here’s where it gets interesting. Network owners give them access to troves of thin content, usually recipes or vapid “lifestyle” tips, while cramming their pages to the gills with ads. The humans in this network provide a veneer of authenticity. These affiliate networks are the new Tupperware or LuLaRoe, where housewives or hobbyists sell clicks instead of Amway. In many cases they’re coming from pages purporting to be “blogs” which in fact are nodes in an “affiliate network.” We’re seeing a rash of posts like this soliciting a kind of engagement that would reveal valuable personal insights. Yes, a question-post invites more engagement than a simple comment, but there’s something else at work here. The second one on the same hyper-twee recipe page generated 1.4 million comments and 35,000 shares. This, however is a little different: That first post generated 21 comments and 59 shares. We’re used to seeing a lot of harmless, banal mommy-chum like this: Social media is a relentless contest for attention, like junior high. There’s nothing new about clickbait posts on Facebook.
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