All Some Businesses Really Want Are Your Eyeballs
In this internet age of ready and constant access to information, which can be potentially useless or misleading, all sorts of businesses try to position themselves to take advantage of this enormous user engagement opportunity.
Online advertising has become such a money maker for many businesses. In fact, this revenue channel has made several businesses giants in their respective spaces.
While there is nothing wrong in creating demand for online ads and profiting from them, as it should be in a freedom-loving capitalistic society, a somewhat disturbing trend has taken shape that should be pointed out.
Let me explain with an example. There are weather businesses that provide weather information to anyone that cares to view and use such information. This type of weather data are made available to the viewers, at minimal to no cost to them. Let's take the extreme case, in which the weather data provider is not charging the viewers for such weather data at all. Some of these weather businesses are not not-for-profit business entities either. How do they stay profitable without charging their viewers for the weather data, when their core business is all about weather data?
As you probably guessed, these weather businesses provide you with weather data for "free" and are happy to get your eyeballs in return. They will capitalize on your eyeballs by selling online ads. In fact, they couldn't care less about not being able to charge the viewers for the weather data.
So far so good except for one critically important issue with this business arrangement. These weather data providers are using very limited information (often less than 10%) in creating these weather data products for consumption by the viewers. In other words, such weather data products are inconsistent and inaccurate and therefore are useless to misleading to the consumers.
Because some of these weather data products are provided free of cost to the consumers, not counting the indirect cost of online ads, these consumers can not demand for more consistently accurate weather data products. At the same time, some of these weather data providers have no incentive to produce more consistently accurate weather data because they are happily generating revenue via online ads.
The weather business is a good example for this type of misleading business offerings, but, if you look closely, you will find many other businesses that really only care about your eyeballs.
These weather data providers tend to rely on miniscule amounts of weather data and pretty much ignore the underlying physical processes that constantly shape the atmospheric variables of interest.
For further reading, read the following weblinks to other online articles by Dr. James Stalker, who has written about the deficiencies of current weather and climate data products that do not take the underlying physical processes into consideration.
1. A Truly Magical Weather Station That Multiplies, http://jrstalker.wordpress.com/2013/11/17/a-truly-magical-weather-station-that-multiplies/
2. Wind Measurement Limitations Explained With A Spinning Bucket Analogy, http://jrstalker.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/wind-measurement-limitations-explained-with-a-spinning-bucket-analogy/
3. The Difficulty In Quantifying The Extent Of Global Warming Or Cooling, http://jrstalker.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/the-difficulty-in-quantifying-the-extent-of-global-warming-or-cooling/
4. And other articles available at jrstalker.wordpress.com
