Social media "feed ads" are a four-way commoditization of online audiences

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Understand "feed ads"

The feed was originally intended to "feed or feed (a person or animal), a connotation that is introduced into the information dissemination model to summarize an emerging mode of information pushing and receiving on the Internet, specifically in the form of information sites that push information or information to specific users, who receive relevant information or information based on their personal interests or needs." So Feed can be translated into sources, information, feeds, news feeds, feeds, etc. In this mode of propagation, users have some choice and can add or remove specific sources of information at any time. On social media, feed mode is represented by "new things" (Renren), "New Weibo" (Sina Weibo), "New Dynamics" (QQ space), and so on. It should be noted that this new information is actively filtered by the user, so this pattern is interpreted as a "subscription" of the information to highlight the initiative of the network audience.

Social media platforms "Feed Ads" Through the analysis of "big data" such as netizen information and "user production content" (UGC), the advertising content is integrated into netizens' "information flow" and embedded into the social relationship and information interaction structure of netizens, forming people's "participation" in advertising.It is important to emphasize that this embedding is not as user-owned and subscribed as a "feed" systemIt is the operators of social media who force embedding in the information update list.From the point of view of the network audience, the "feed advertisement" of social media realizes the labor and commercialization of the audience's personal information technology usage behavior, social relations and its leisure and entertainment behavior, which is worthy of reflection and vigilance.

"Feed Ads" and the four-way commoditization of online audiences

1. Commoditization of users and their use

In The Feed advertising model, social media platforms do not "spread" ads to online audiences in the traditional "one-to-many" form of deliveryAccording to the personal information of the network audience, including gender, region, age, consumption level, object of concern, QQ personal information and other relatively stable demographic attributes, as well as user activity, reading interest, search content and other short-term indicators of "labeling", so as to classify the audience.Thus, compared with the advertising in the traditional media industry, Internet enterprises have greatly improved the accuracy of advertising delivery, thus saving advertising products companies a lot of advertising expenses.

On the social media platform, the network audience is not only passive viewers, but also content producers, they are in the "panoramic prison" as Ffoko said, the monitoring of digital capital and capital "receiving", as the contemporary Western communication political economy said, the network audience has become the Internet enterprises to carry out unpaid labor "digital labor."Professor Christian Fuchs, a professor at the University of Westminster, summed it upThree ways in which digital capitalism exploits "digital labor———First, compulsive: With the network and digitization of daily communication and social relations, people have to use the Internet; Second, alienation: Internet companies, not users themselves, own the platform and profit from it; Third, the dual commercialization of produser (a complex of producers and users): The user itself is a commodity, and the information produced by the user is also a commodity.

In this way, it is necessary to review the relationship between "using the Internet" and "user-generated content" (UGC) and the audience's voice: The so-called "use" and "expression" is nothing more than the "digital labor" that netizens pay for Internet companies, and in the process of labor, they constantly expose their social relationships with individuals, and produce private information, hobbies and concerns that have the value of business exchange and capital conversion for the company, thus promoting the accumulation of capital.Therefore, the tracking and monitoring of the network audience and its UGC is essentially the sale and secondary exploitation of 'digital labor'.

The commercialization of the space for social relations

Unlike ads in traditional media, social media ads represented by "feed ads" don't just fit Web2. 0 The information interaction structure, and the social relations of netizens in social media into the advertising interaction mode, formed an unprecedented "sense of participation" advertising. Take this timeTencent's WeChat "Friends Circle" adFor example, Tencent forces the insertion of advertising information into the "Friends" information list, and any of your "friends in the circle" who "like" or "forward" the ad will appear in your list of messages; Second, if you've ever expressed a dislike or dislike for an ad and "liked" or "commented," then any "like" or "comment" from your "friend" will become a new development in your circle of friends and appear in your list of messages, which means that the ad will be exposed to you again. It is not difficult to find that this attachment to the "friends circle" of the original "strong relationship" of communication and information interaction model, the social relations of netizens into the advertising process, "friends" impression of advertising will also greatly affect weChat users' attitude towards the same advertisement. According to this logic, this kind of advertising model will inevitably give birth to more and more game-style advertising and "controversial" advertising, in order to stimulate the user's enthusiasm, strengthen the user's sense of participation, thereby increasing the repeated exposure of advertising, consolidate the user's impression of an advertisement.

In the classic Feed ad case on Facebook, retailer Wal-Mart set the ad content to vote or choose to boost sales of NBA-themed T-shirts with the words "Show your team spirit!" Want to increase the popularity of the team, just point 'like'; If you want to boost the morale of the team, just 'share'! With the ad craze of NBA games, this form of advertising and participation that inspires fans quickly made ads popular on Facebook and became a classic model for increasing user engagement in feed ads. Uniquely, in the first batch of WeChat "Friends Circle" advertising, Tencent adopted a crowd-based advertising model, so that different users receive different ads, and in the "Friends Circle" widely broadcast the highly controversial slogan: "See BMW is Toho, see vivo is silk, see Coca-Cola is 2B youth, nothing to see, I'm sorry, you have been abandoned." While this is not true, this type of advertising model, which differentiates users and ranks them, contributes significantly to the secondary dissemination of advertising.

3. Commercialization of entertainment and emotion

In Smyth's "audience commodity theory" there is a seemingly extreme but very enlightening argument, that is, "no leisure under monopoly capitalism", specifically, in the context of the traditional media industry, the audience's listening behavior is the process of labor for the media industry, and other leisure and entertainment activities after the radio or television is also working hours, because these activities are to supplement the above-mentioned labor time, labor re-production. This statement has caused great controversy in the academic circles, but no matter how universal it is, it provides us with an enlightening meaning to understand the capital production in the current Internet age, because it breaks the binary opposition model of labor and leisure and entertainment, and the line between the two is becoming more and more blurred and even perfectly integrated in today's increasingly commercialized social media.

The U.S. social media platform, represented by Facebook and Twitter, taps into Web 2. 0 Interaction mode and viral communication mode, in more and more Feed advertising design into entertainment, participation, emotion, games and other elements to absorb the network audience for its secondary dissemination, greatly driving the audience entertainment and fan sentiment of the commercialization process.

Take the IKEA ad on Facebook, for example, where IKEA uploads a picture of IKEA furniture and embeds a "label" feature in the image, allowing online audiences to "take possession" of the furniture by selecting a favorite piece of furniture on top of the image and marking it with their name on it, while other "friends" can also label it and continue to grab other furniture. In practical terms, this advertising strategy has been so successful that "many users are waiting for Gordon to post pictures every day;" IKEA furniture is viewed over and over again for fear of missing out on which favorite furniture." Not only that, the action of "labeling" will produce the forwarding behavior of advertising content, forming the second-level or even multi-level dissemination of content, which is similar to the above-mentioned WeChat "friends circle" principle. In another Feed ad for IKEA in Hong Kong, the audience can choose the type, color, etc. of IKEA furniture according to their preferences, so as to piece together their favorite match.

At the same time, the audience can be free to match the furniture pictures uploaded, participate in the netizen voting campaign, the winner can get a certain reward. It is not difficult to find that IKEA in its feed ads not only injected leisure and entertainment, fan emotion, participation, social interaction and other elements, but also joined the competition, preestory and other elements of pleasure, inspired the audience to win the instinct. Thus, leisure, ostentatiousness, flirtation, self-deprecation and so on have been effectively included in the dissemination process of advertising content, and become the object of the commercialization of digital capital. It seems that we can further develop the term "no leisure under monopoly capitalism" and replace it with the words "no leisure on social media": on social media platforms, leisure, happiness and labor are highly integrated, not you and me.

Conclusions and reflections

From the perspective of the development of the Internet industry, social media "feed advertising" represents the future direction of advertising, Internet users' private information, preferences, technology use, social relations, leisure and entertainment will be effectively transformed into commercial value of the dissemination of labor and elements; And from the point of view of the network audience, with the spread and popularization of Internet technology, especially with the development of the Internet of Things, digital capital will fully penetrate into every detail and corner of people's daily life, forming a time and space colonization of the mass society: at the time level, entertainment and leisure time and working hours are no longer clearly divided, work entertainment, entertainment work will become a trend; At the spatial level, the public domain from the mass media to the personal private domain will be infiltrated by digital capital. As communication researchers, we should not only reveal this process of digital colonization and occupation, but also think about how to resist this process in the tide of digital capitalism, so as to safeguard the freedom and equality of mass communication and the public domain as the cornerstone of democracy.

Bibliography:

Wu Dingming, Shi Yibin. Social Media "Feed Ads" and the Four Commoditizations of Online Audiences (Journal of China Media University), 2015, 37 (06): 106-109.

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