The Customer is Always Right
If you were to ask a random person on the street, “What is the largest company in America,” odds are that a good number of them would respond with Facebook or Google. Both companies earn a lot of revenue from advertisers, thereby making advertisers a key part of their business models; however, both companies also offer predominantly free services to attract users, thereby also making users a key part of the business model. In fact, if you ask Google’s chief economist Hal Varian or Facebook head of ad engineering Andrew Bosworth, the primary goal for Google and Facebook is to display content that consumers value. The emphasis on providing high-quality content to users, therefore, lies at the heart of these businesses.
How do Facebook and Google provide high-quality content to users? As discussed by Professors Easley and Tardos at Cornell, Google and Facebook make good use of the principles underlying concepts such as PageRank and hubs and authorities to determine which content a user sees; however, an arguably equally important method is simple experimentation.
To give an example, in 2012, Facebook randomly selected users to see what effect changing the number of positive and negative posts on someone’s newsfeed would have. In doing so, Facebook sought to “investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out” while also checking if “exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook.” Another way of thinking about this could be research into how posts affect the balance of networks. Simply put, the company was looking for better ways to serve its users by identifying how the positive and negative relations across the network could impact subsequent interactions on the network. The research team found that people who were shown more positive posts responded well to more positive posts by writing positive posts. The opposite was true if negative posts were shown.
A lot goes into the algorithms used by companies like Google, Facebook, and others. It’s difficult to say whether the principles like PageRank are “right;” however, as Google and Facebook continue to grow, the user always will be.
Sources Consulted:
• http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html
• https://www.wired.com/2015/09/facebook-doesnt-make-much-money-couldon-purpose/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8qQXLby4PY