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3-thoughts-on-the-costs-of-free-things-online.md

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+# Thoughts on the costs of "free" things online.
+
+## What does "free" actually mean?
+My brother was a lot yonger than me when he was born and so I got to see him grow from an infant to the young adult. One of my lessons from this relationship was to learn how a child may understand ad content — and how that's relevant to modern adults like you and I who are submerged in marketing material online.
+
+**With caveatts discarded, "free" means gift.** My little brother's logic correctly deduced that accepting gifts can enrich oneself and thus gifts should not be ignored. He also knew that adults may like to stop him from having fun (which is true) and thus their advice should be taken with a grain of salt.
+
+And so it was foolish of me to feel so annoyed with my brother for his persistent praise and recital of ads he saw as part of his cartoon-watching and gaming experiences. I felt that he was taken advantage of by the messages he failed to interpret correctly.
+
+He eventually learned to mistrust promoted content on his own — as expected from most adults in (I assume) most cultures.
+
+## Are we lied to by ads with impunity?
+
+Governments benefit from trade by collecting taxes. They often facilitate the trade by reducing the risk of being robbed. And since deception is a thief's tool, there are often laws that prohibit misleading advertisements.
+
+Why do we then have to ask **"what's the catch?"** when presented with a "free gift" or a set of positive attributes for a product?
+
+There's an entire field of psychology concerned with advertisements. In short, there are many techniques (i.e., ways of saying or presenting information) that can persuade people to make a purchase, even if they had no intent to previously. These techniques are typically allowed. A "free gift" is one of such tools, which is used to entice us to make a purchase.
+
+Persuation works, but it is learned. And so as my brother grew, he became familiar with many techniques, such as "free gift - but you need to make a purchase (or do some work)!" which he learned to ignore and use to influence his friends and relatives.
+
+## Commercial overload.
+
+The story of a growing human in a modern digital environment does not end there. The ads keep comming and their numbers increase as we spend more time at our screens. The sheer number of commercial content - about 10,000 per day according to [some estimates](https://siteefy.com/how-many-ads-do-we-see-a-day/) — is too much for our brains to process, so we try to ignore them.
+
+But some ads know a way to get through our filters.
+
+## Add-on cost of online advertisements: privacy and security.
+
+Putting technicalities such as ad-blockers and black-hat programming aside, one of the best ways to fulfill a business goal is to sell a product to a customer and provide a service that will make them want to make repeat transactions. This can mean selling an item that's relevant to someone's needs or wants.
+
+While persuation techniques can change minds, they don't always work. Potential customers who find the product irrelevant to their lifestyle or needs will keep ignoring the ads. And since ad space costs money (let's say $1 per potential customer's single view), such customers are a money waster for businesses. Imagine spending $100,000 on ad space to see five peole spend ten bucks in your store each. A disaster!
+
+In reality, the conversion rates on commercial content are often between 0.1%-10%, which means that the above example spenditure of $100,000 may yield between 100 and 10,000 purchases. Obviously, most companies want more business and thus they try and use all the tools available to get it.
+
+The persuasion techniques that the science tests and studies have existed for a long time; we may not understand how they work yet we still learn and use them. However, the nature of the internet enhanced greately our ability to create profiles and track individuals. And by doing so, the businesses gained and improved ability to spend the money on people who are more likely to convert into a customer.
+
+Consider an ad in the sports section of a print newspaper. By spending money there, instead of the pages of a photography magazine, a business can sell more baseball bats per advertising dollar spent. But imagine if the same newspaper could display an add to just the readers who actually play baseball and need a new bat. Perhaps that's just 5% of the newspaper readers, and so the business is saving 95% of the costs (minus the markup the newspaper would take for providing such tracking ability). And so the business can take these savings and take them to ten more newspapers to sell even more bats. Plus, there's more: our digital technologies now allow us to share the information on individual users across all the newspapers in this example to target them even better and repetitively.
+
+But the effective digital advertising's power comes with costs. Persuasion can sway people to spend inefficiently, causing damage to personal finances and the environment.
+
+The damage inficted by mining and sale of personal profiles and identification (which makes ad targeting efficient) is less straight-forward. The sheer number of contracts with vendors we sign daily without reading masks the intentions of the businesses that have access to your location and records of online interactions. Though even if the product stated in big bold letters, "WE TRACK YOU AND SELL THAT INFO TO EVERYBODY" are unlikely to scare social creatures who walk the streets without fear of being seen. Especially when the prize is a piece of software that's worth tens of hundreds of dollars.
+
+What's hard to fathom is how detailed those records are. I've recently downloaded my Twitter data, which is over 2GB, which is over a million pages (or more than 300 best-seller-type books, maybe fewer as some of that data is imges).
+
+And what happens once that data becomes available and aggregated outside of the silos of the companies we clikced "AGREE" on under the terms?
+
+
+
+## Online marketing as an enabler of open art and education.
+