According to the most recent projections, the digital giants Facebook and Google are expected to have scooped up half of the global digital advertising revenues in 2017.
What these giants are dealing in, is the exposure and collection of information.
They filter and expose information to the user while they browse sites for friends, articles, political content, or more tangible consumer products covering everything from hygiene products to lawnmowers.
Meanwhile, the users’ interaction with the content is collected and fed to algorithms that build extensive user profiles of preferred content, consumer habits, and so on.
In other words, the digital giants farm their users for information and sell it to companies, and those ads are then exposed to the users, which leads to more detailed user profiles, which are then sold to the companies – rinse and repeat ad infinitum.