There’s one Economics class I remember particularly well.
We were talking about the news and Ryanair (an airline) came up. They recently had put up a press release about how they might be developing standing places in flight or something like that, and midst our discussion our teacher said “Don’t you understand? Ryanair is just trying to make you talk about Ryanair” but he was largely drowned out by the class giggling at a girl miming being in a standing seat on the plane. I think that was my first introduction to the idea that marketing can be more than just… description of a product. Marketing can also be something that would make you talk about the company, as in, generate further publicity. This, for refence was 2010.
Skip a few years, and it’s now 2020. AI automation has become a new coming of that jewish bloke and is getting more and more and more involved in companies either because of its functionality or it’s a new toy that executives want to mash with their business model. This has naturally given a rise to a new kind of entrepreneur, ones that figured out how to game the said automation.
It’s not a secret anymore that social media’s revenue generation comes from ads. The use of a social media platform to a consumer is ‘free’, except it isn’t and the payment is your personal data and your attention. To this end, we see ads. The more ads we see – the more revenue is generated. Us seeing ads, or doing the ‘work’ of seeing ads is now a source of revenue.
Case one: The play for your attention.
A couple of Russian entrepreneurs figured out that you can get a lot of attention by creating a content farm that produces a lot of videos loosely based around the ideas of ‘lifehacks’ and diy projects.
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