Thread · 4 tweets · 26 Jan 2019

Solon is right. People rarely realise this but a publisher's most valuable asset is its audience and the core business model of Facebook or Google’s ad arm is to steal it. People who tell you that a free press needs today's adtech work for adtech.

The terms with those players are typically that they cannot use a publisher's audience for targeting *on its own*. So they can't target a newspaper's audience, but they can target that audience plus a random user. Contacts built from weasel wording.

The Web's primary business model today is: - You build an audience for your service or content. - Platforms will give you a small share of the advertising value for that audience. - Platforms will use the majority of the profit from that exchange to build up more market power.

The primary enablers of this system are Chrome, Android, and iOS. Facebook is a major player but without direct help from Google and Apple it would not be able to do what it does. It's great that Apple is walking some of its privacy talk. But some is not enough.