Page 54 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

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• Explicit Profile data (e.g.name, age, place where they live...)
• Users’ interactions within the social media (e.g. posts, photo/video shared with the community, comments on other posts...)
• The right to collect, store and utilise any user data for various purposes.
Social Media platforms, by means of Big Social Data collection and analytics, can infer the preferences and usage behavior of the members and use them to monetize user data by selling them to advertising agencies that have the opportunity to issue efficiently hyper-personal- ized marketing campaigns. Moreover, Social Media platforms use all the information regard- ing users and their interactions within the community to generate useful insights that help to update and optimize the existing services and to create new services.
This business model has proved to be extremely successful for both parties involved: Social Media platforms and users. The growth in terms of number of users and level of engagement with the platforms has been rapidly rising in the last few years to an average daily use of Social Media platforms in Western Europe of about 80 minutes, according to SmartInsights Social Media Research. These numbers are expected to grow even more due to the fact that Social Media platforms have been continuously enlarging their offering of services in order to maximize users’ engagement,
leading to an increased appeal for advertising agencies and coverage of more aspects of users’ lifestyle, and to create a platform capable of providing an almost complete portfolio of services covering many more aspects of people’s lifestyle and needs than just media entertainment (music, VoD, gaming, Live Video sharing).
The Social Media platforms’ business models are based on attention – the more the people using a platform the more advertisement can be done.
As to other aspects of people’s lifestyle, Social Media platforms want to become a trusted means of accessing news and information, so they are starting (e.g. Facebook) to engage with professional editors in order to spread reliable information inside the community. Some other services that are included in the social media value proposition are tourist travel guides and payment applications. Furthermore, it is reck- oned that in the coming years Augmented and Virtual Reality applications will be added to the Social Media platforms, leading to a very rich offering in the entertainment field.
The Social Media platforms’ business models are based on attention – the more the people using a platform the more advertisement can be done, so that the Social Media platforms are mainly interested in grabbing users’ attention to get users to stay on their platform as long
as possible, whereas the available content is secondary, and this is one of the enablers of the fake news. Thus, the current business models applied by Social Media platforms are acting in favor of the content and fake news and should be reconsidered – maybe also through appropri- ate regulation and taxation measures.
Furthermore, if we define a customer as somebody who pays for a service, then the real customer of the Social Media platforms is the advertising industry, as the end users are not paying for using Social Media services. As end users are not the platforms’ customers in a real
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