Week 5 Reflections

As Paul mentioned regarding the Cha (2013) reading, I agree it is really interesting to think about how these different social networking entities generate revenues. A decent portion of the revenue stream for these companies comes from syndicating peoples' data and also creating ad platforms that tailor themselves to your Facebook profile. I find it intriguing that even though Facebook has had so much backlash b/c of how they handle privacy and peoples' data (here, here, here), the company is financially doing really well, by focusing on mobile. Given there aren't any real threats to Facebook (we'll see if Ello makes a dent) it appears that it can continue to operate like a monopoly.

I think Napoli brings up a number of interesting points. First, I think it is really important to think about digital divide issues especially when we talk about who can engage and who has access to engage with media. Secondly, within the pool of people who can engage only a small fraction are producing media while the rest are "lurkers." However, Napoli's analysis focuses on how the media industry can better capitalize on a bevy of open data in the form of user generated conversation and content. I'd be interested to know how media makers within the audience are using this data as well to optimize ad revenues and as a result profits. As we discussed last week there are several free tools at the disposal of "the audience" such as Google Analytics.