Browsing for millions

The internet companies are making millions of dollars from data collected through the web. We are familiar with the story of Amazon’s Kindle. Kindle is an e-book reader, which tracks your browsing history of books, which you decide to buy or add it to your wish-list. Now if it were for booksellers of physical stores could always track which books were sold and which did not but since the online shopping has emerged the knowing of your customers and understanding them has all now moved to a different level. How many books you browse, which kind of books you buy, what sort of reviews you leave are now all taken into considerations. All this analysis helps the seller and of course, the internet companies to do their research and help your shopping experience a lot easier and engaging.

 The data is collected from your browsing history which helps the companies enhance their marketing skills to attract and engage a larger audience. Netflix - a site which offers millions of movies and television series on hire, uses a statistical technique called as collaborative filtering to make recommendations to users based on what they have watched or clicked and what other users preferred. For example, if you have selected “The Conjuring”, you will find similar movies from horror genre for recommendations like Insidious, Sinister etc.

Facebook, the social media networking giant tracks its users, which are over 1 billion currently. Half of whom spend on an average of almost an hour on the site every day. Based on the likes, dislikes, the pages the users follow you get an advertisement recommendation on the right side of your newsfeed. The most data is collected from none other than Google which can be called as the big shark has around $529.54 billion market capitalization. Google exploits information that is of user interaction or data which automatically recycled to improve the service provided to the users. There is little privacy or integrity of information left as such in this big data age. All your personal information is used by these web-world moguls to make money.

Instagram recently changed its linear feed and moved to an algorithmic timeline, like its big brother, Facebook, to double down on engagement. Around 75% of the users weren’t seeing the majority of the content in their feed. The algorithm would show the users the best of best, making it easier to share the content. Earlier the users used to find the content which was instantly shared or recently shared on their feed, but now they find the best of stuff they follow. Because of this brands will now have to create compelling, rich and engaging content.  

Perhaps time will tell us which big shark is going rule the world making billions in this big data age.

Ajeta Sawant

(image source: google)