Ad or Facebook Post
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/technology/how-facebook-ads-work.html
Ever since smart phones have become ubiquitous, social media platforms have turned to this new style of advertising, ads as content. Posts have shown up with the keyword “sponsored,” encouraging users to like a page or visit a webpage or online shop. The ads can be tailored to your previous history, pages that you’ve liked, or even words from your latest posts. We’ve all experienced a situation similar to this: going on a clothing website, closing that website, perusing Facebook, and seeing an ad for that exact clothing website. Further, users can even interact with the ad through reacting or commenting on the post, and the more interaction an ad receives, the more relevant it is, and the more it gets “promoted.” This cycle is one of the reasons the sensationalist ads placed by Russia gained so much traction because it generated so much emotional response.
Facebook have combined the idea of auctions and voting by in-links. While they are still running an auction and having advertisers place bids for certain situations or users, they are using the interactions as “votes” in how relevant an ad is, which increases the authority of that page or link. After a certain point, the price per click starts to decrease, and that page may start to appear on other people’s pages without the sponsored keyword, disguising itself as original content. For the social media user, the more the user promotes political content or any other popular content, the more other users follow said user for relatable content and the more advertisers would want their ad to be sponsored on that user’s news feed. This constant cycle between users and advertisers highly mimics the idea of hubs and authorities in web networks.