Comment by edmundsauto
5 years ago
Why not “providing value to users so they use the service so they see ads”? A lot of providing value is marketing and engagement. It can be manipulative and it can also be beneficial to the user - both should be accounted for.
"It can be manipulative and it can also be beneficial to the user"
Example please, how it can be beneficial to me, to be manipulated by ads.
Ads pay for a service that allows you to video chat on a reliable and private connection with anyone in the world, for free. They also pay for google search, which has immense value to you.
They also connect consumers with products they might want. Most advertising is simply making sure people know about a product if/when they need it, no deception required.
The ads are still not beneficial to me.
I simply trade something bad for value.
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Why invest in "providing value to users" when psychological manipulation is so much cheaper?
Because people tend to drop you and forget about it when you only provide clickbait and doomscroll fodder when they realize that you have nothing of value to provide.
I'm not so sure about that. What value does Facebook offer that isn't done better by a dozen other platforms? Most people I talk to openly admit it provides them with no value, but they still idly scroll through their feeds day after day and can never bring themselves to ditch the platform. Simply put, they're addicted. Facebook is widely hated yet wildly successful because they have mastered psychological manipulation.
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Y'know that would be a great point if the opposite wasn't steadily happening since 2007 at the very latest.
Different metrics. Providing value could be measured in different ways concentrating on that. Engagement doesn't even have to provide value. User going through more pages to get to the thing they need and spending more time in the app is engagement.
It depends on how you define engagement, I suppose. I've never heard people discuss time spent as an engagement metric, which is (IME) usually actions taken by a user that the business wants to measure.
Engagement just measures how engaged your users are. Time spent measures that. These are all proxies for value, because it is very hard to measure value received.
This would be great if the metric was measuring value. Measuring value is hard; the closest quantified analog we have is money.
So a valid comparison might be "how much would anyone actually pay for this ad-funded thing?" It turns out the answer is often $0.
Time or attention is another way we can measure value. Imperfect, but all measurements are imperfect.