REU project

Most social media platforms and websites are free to use– yet they rake in billions of dollars in revenue yearly. For instance, Facebook is a free to use website for users who want to create an account and access the platform. Despite it being free, they still made over 50 billion in revenue in 2018 from their website alone. Over 99% of this 50 billion dollar revenue came from one source –– ads.

Overall, Facebook alone sells advertisements to over 7 million different advertisers. The way they sell ads is by allowing these advertisers to put ads on the Facebook website for users to see and interact with. Ads are in fact how most free websites are at least partially able to sustain themselves. Websites can go about making money off ads in a couple ways.

For one, they can use Google’s adsense program. This is a program that allows websites to easily use google’s information to give ads to users that utilize all of google’s algorithms.

Another option for websites is directly advertising and getting paid by a company to put their specific ads on the site. There are even more ways in which websites can make money with ads including CPC and CPM. CPC stands for cost per click, and with this method the website gets paid based on how many times the advertisement on the site was clicked on. CPM refers to cost per thousand, and the website gets a certain amount based on how many thousands of people see the ad, but doesn’t rely on users to click it, and therefore gives more stable rates than CPC.

One of the most popular and profitable methods of displaying online-advertisements is called “Targeted Advertising”. Used by many of the large social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, and additionally also used by Google ad sense, targeted advertising is when websites collect data from their users, and use this information to let advertisements become more efficient via algorithms. These algorithms do their best to guess what a certain user might be interested in based on their likes, follows, age, and other information a user on a site might input into a platform. Targeted advertising might even take into account how fast you are typing to try and judge your mood and show you ads based on that. Targeted Ads allow advertisers to target specific groups of people, which means they can get more clicks for their views, which means Facebook and other sites can sell ads for much more. In fact, targeted advertising itself has become so successful that their use has become more popular than normal or non-targeted advertising.

With companies and websites having extreme amounts of data on their users, many problematic moral issues have arisen on top of security problems with the data. For instance, websites will sell the data to other groups or companies who resell it to advertisers or anyone willing to buy information, essentially making your data public for anyone to see. These groups and companies are often referred to as data brokers, because the commodity they sell and buy is data. They can also sell it to insurance companies who will give different rates depending on what they know about you from this information. On the security side, since there’s so much data that websites like Facebook have on users, there have been several leaks