• En 2019, Londres a interdit la publicité pour la malbouffe dans les transports
    https://mastodon.social/@LoboTom/111930418733128490

    Thomas Bourgenot sur Mastodon :

    En 2019, Londres a interdit la publicité pour la malbouffe dans les transports.
    Une étude montre que la consommation de malbouffe a depuis décru.

    La pub, ça marche.
    Corollaire, son interdiction aussi.

    La pub, ça rapporte.
    Mais la pub, ça coûte aussi cher à la société.

    (bref, interdisons la pub pour les produits polluants et/ou mauvais pour la santé, comme on a fait pour le tabac)

    TfL junk food ad ban has helped Londoners shop more healthily – study | Health | The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/feb/17/tfl-junk-food-ad-ban-has-helped-londoners-shop-more-healthily-study

    Researchers estimate a 1,000 calorie decrease in unhealthy purchases associated with the policy

    #selon_une_étude_récente #publicité #malbouffe #junk_food

  • La publicité digitale : son utilité pour la société, ses problèmes actuels, les causes et comment travailler aux solutions
    https://www.journaldunet.com/adtech/1527983-la-publicite-digitale-son-utilite-pour-la-societe-ses-probleme

    Les rapprochements ces dernières années entre le lobby du secteur de la publicité digitale (l’Alliance Digitale, ex IAB) et les organismes d’état indépendants (Cnil, Autorité de la concurrence & Arcom) sont un premier pas pour une régulation plus efficace. Il a notamment été productif en 2020 concernant l’interprétation et l’application de loi RGPD sur le recueil du consentement des données personnelles.

    Est-il nécessaire de créer un organisme d’État indépendant spécifique à la publicité digitale ? Comme cela a été fait pour la finance de marché passé la crise des subprimes de 2008, comme nous le rappelle le livre « Le grand krach de l’attention » de Tim Hwang, qui compare ces deux secteurs ? Est-ce que l’Arcom peut monter au créneau, avec un budget renforcé ? Comment travailler avec la Cnil et l’Autorité de la concurrence, qui ont accéléré leurs travaux pour notre secteur depuis quelques années ? Comment prendre en compte les arguments des associations de protection des données personnelles comme Noyb ? Faut-il espérer créer des big techs européennes, laisser Google Meta Amazon Apple Amazon dominer le secteur, ou favoriser l’entrée des big techs chinois (BATX) ?

    #Publicité #Tim_Hwang #Publicité_numérique

  • Rachel Silvera : Encore et toujours de la pub sexiste !

    L’association Résistance à l’agression publicitaire (RAP) a publié le 5 décembre 2023 le deuxième rapport de son observatoire de la publicité sexiste (OPS) intitulé « Le sexisme dans la publicité française 2022-2023 ».

    Le premier rapport de 2021 qui a passé au crible des publicités sur toute la France pendant un an constatait déjà que le publisexisme était un problème aigu, touchant principalement les femmes et s’appuyant sur des mises en scène stéréotypées : des corps sexualisés, épilés, blancs, minces, jeunes, en position de soumission, de séduction, d’infantilisation, de travail domestique…

    https://entreleslignesentrelesmots.wordpress.com/2023/12/13/deuxieme-rapport-le-sexisme-dans-la-publicite-francaise/#comment-60004

    #publicité #sexisme

  • Deuxième rapport : Le sexisme dans la publicité française

    Résistance à l’Agression Publicitaire (R.A.P.) publie le deuxième rapport de son Observatoire de la Publicité Sexiste intitulé Le sexisme dans la publicité française, 2022-2023. Ce rapport fait suite à une première version publiée en 2021 et montre que les mauvaises pratiques constatées à l’époque restent de mise, voire se renforcent. L’autorégulation publicitaire est un échec : la publicité française contribue à perpétuer les stéréotypes et les injonctions de genre les plus ridicules et les plus violentes.

    https://entreleslignesentrelesmots.wordpress.com/2023/12/13/deuxieme-rapport-le-sexisme-dans-la-publicite-

    #sexisme #publicité

    • rezo.net n’affiche que du texte. C’est la condition parfaite pour gagner leur badge. Leur test produit le même résultat pour notre site pro. Par contre un site sur le même serveur qui contient beaucoup d’images n’obtient que la notation C.

      Le test ne prend apparamment pas en compte l’efficacité de la programmation des scripts qui produisent le site ni du coût énergétique des base de données à l’oeuvre, alors qu’à ce niveau il y a d’énormes différences. Je ne sais pas s’il donnent de meilleurs scores aux sites statiques systématiquement très efficaces ou s’il font la différence entre SPIP, Drupal etc. et les sites au technologies propriétaires, je ne vois également pas d’analyse des systèmes de cache côté serveur et du type CDN ...

      C’est un joli truc pour impressionner la galerie mais ne dit rien du tout sur l’efficacité énergétique de la production et transmission des informations.

      Pourtant c’est marrant, alors félicitations pour le score excellent !
       :-)

      #internet #www #énergie #écologie #publicité #greenwashing

    • @monolecte ben quand même, 3,6Mo sur une seule page … Au siècle dernier quand le modem grésillait encore les recommandations étaient de 50ko tout compris.
      Et le JS c’est pas l’horreur si par exemple ça permet de servir des images adaptées et au poids réduit.
      J’ai des pages avec images au score de 80%, bon, pas tout les sites. Mais je pense qu’effectivement tout les paramètres d’une page ne peuvent pas être pris en compte : ne serait-ce que la consommation électrique du serveur ou son optimisation comme le code la mise en cache etc
      Je me fie plus à pagespeed et aux recommandations web.

  • Les SUV occupent-ils vraiment « 18 pages de pub » chaque jour dans la presse, comme le dit Marine Tondelier ?
    https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-radio/le-vrai-du-faux/les-suv-occupent-ils-vraiment-18-pages-de-pub-chaque-jour-dans-la-press

    Alors que la mairie de Paris va organiser un vote pour ou contre un stationnement plus cher pour les SUV, Marine Tondelier, la secrétaire nationale du parti Les Ecologistes estime qu’il faudrait aussi s’attaquer à la publicité : « J’ai un problème avec le fait qu’on glorifie ce type de véhicule dans la pub. Quand vous comptez la pub dans les journaux français, c’est l’équivalent chaque jour de 18 pages d’une édition nationale », a-t-elle déclaré jeudi 16 novembre sur Sud Radio.

    La réponse est OUI, évidemment.

  • Björn Höcke als Adolf Hitler : Bild zeigt AfD-Politiker mit Schnauzbart
    https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/hoecke-der-neue-hitler-bild-kampagne--li.2154204

    Voilà un #nazi avec prépuce, du moins c’est-ce qu’on devine car la circoncision se pratique peu chez les Allemands ni juifs ni muselmans. Ce n’est pas drôle non plus, parce que l’affiche n’est pas ambiguë du tout et parce que Bild est politiquement tellement proche des nazis que l’affiche sert à faire oublier ce fait.

    31.10.2023 von Maximilian Beer - Ist Björn Höcke der neue Hitler? Die neue Werbekampagne der Bild legt diesen Vergleich nahe. Auf einer animierten Werbetafel zeigt die Boulevardzeitung den AfD-Politiker Höcke mit einem Hitler-Bart. Der schwarze Punkt wandert in einer Animation unter die Nase des AfD-Politikers und wird so zum berüchtigten Schnauzer. Dazu der Slogan: „Wir bringen’s auf den Punkt. Bild bleibt Bild.“

    In der korrespondierenden Presseerklärung schreibt der Axel-Springer-Verlag, dass die Kampagne zum neuen Markenauftritt von „Deutschlands größter Medienmarke“ gehört. BILD-Chefredakteurin Marion Horn wird mit den Worten zitiert: „Wir benennen klar und deutlich, was schiefläuft, aber feiern auch die richtigen Taten und Worte. Dies zeigen wir in unserer neuen Kampagne selbstbewusst, kritisch und zugleich augenzwinkernd.“

    Björn Höcke fiel in seiner politischen Karriere schon häufiger durch radikal rechte Ausfälle auf. Mehrere Gerichtsurteile bestätigten, dass man ihn im Einzelfall als Faschisten oder Nazi bezeichnen darf. Zuletzt hatte in Hessen die Staatsanwaltschaft gegenüber dem Hessischen Rundfunk bestätigt, dass es sich bei einer solchen Bezeichnung um ein „an Tatsachen anknüpfendes Werturteil“ handle. Doch ist der direkte Hitler-Vergleich dadurch zu rechtfertigen?

    Vergleiche von aktuellen Politikern mit Hitler werden von den meisten Historikern kritisch beurteilt, denn Nazi-Vergleiche bergen das Risiko, die Gräuel des Nationalsozialismus zu relativieren. Laut der französischen Sprachwissenschaftlerin Marie-Hélène Pérennec werde durch häufige Nazi-Vergleiche „die Verharmlosung der Verbrechen der Nazis“ begünstigt und eine Gewöhnung an NS-Vergleiche verursacht.

    Trotzdem kommt es in der politischen Auseinandersetzung immer wieder zu Hitler-Vergleichen. Zuletzt sorgte ZDF-Satiriker Jan Böhmermann in der Debatte um Friedrich Merz und seine Äußerungen zu einer möglichen Zusammenarbeit der CDU mit der AfD auf kommunaler Ebene für Irritationen: „Keine Sorge, die Nazis mit Substanz wollen nach aktuellem Stand voraussichtlich nur auf kommunaler Ebene mit Nazis zusammenarbeiten“, schrieb Böhmermann auf Twitter. Damals bot Bild den Böhmermann-Kritikern eine Plattform. Die CDU-Vizechefin Karin Prien sprach von einer Verharmlosung des Nationalsozialismus. Prien sagte zu der Debatte: „Das spaltet die Gesellschaft und betreibt das Geschäft der Nazis.“

    Ist Höcke für Bild also der neue Hitler? Ein Bild-Unternehmenssprecher gab sich auf Anfrage der Berliner Zeitung schmallippig: „Wir machen in dem genannten Motiv der neuen Kampagne „BILD bleibt BILD“ einen Punkt. Was Sie daran erkennen, überlassen wir gerne Ihnen.“

    In der AfD sorgt die Kampagne des Boulevard-Blatts für Kritik. „Wer so für sich wirbt, der kann nicht gleichzeitig den Anspruch erheben, als seriöser Berichterstatter wahrgenommen zu werden“, sagt der hessische Bundestagsabgeordnete Jan Nolte der Berliner Zeitung.

    Der brandenburgische AfD-Abgeordnete René Springer meint: „Die Bild hat selbst dazu beigetragen, dass migrationskritische, konservative oder patriotische Standpunkte in die rechtsextreme Ecke geschoben wurden, worüber man sich jetzt aber beschwert.“

    #wtf #presse #Allemagne #publicité

  • Gericht untersagt Datenschutzverstöße von LinkedIn | Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband
    https://www.vzbv.de/urteile/gericht-untersagt-datenschutzverstoesse-von-linkedin

    Das soziale Netzwerk LinkedIn darf auf seiner Webseite nicht mehr mitteilen, dass es auf „Do-Not-Track“-Signale nicht reagiert, mit denen Nutzer:innen der Nachverfolgung („Tracking“) ihres Surfverhaltens per Browsereinstellung widersprechen. Das hat das Landgericht Berlin nach einer Klage des Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverbands (vzbv) entschieden. Das Gericht untersagte dem Unternehmen außerdem eine Voreinstellung, nach der das Profil des Mitglieds auch auf anderen Webseiten und Anwendungen sichtbar ist. Bereits im vergangenen Jahr hatte das Gericht den ungebetenen Versand von E-Mails an Nichtmitglieder untersagt.

    „Wenn Verbraucher:innen die ,Do-Not-Track‘-Funktion ihres Browsers aktivieren, ist das eine klare Botschaft: Sie wollen nicht, dass ihr Surfverhalten für Werbe- und andere Zwecke ausgespäht wird“, sagt Rosemarie Rodden, Rechtsreferenin beim vzbv. „Webseitenbetreiber müssen dieses Signal respektieren.“

    Traduction :

    Le réseau social LinkedIn n’a plus le droit d’indiquer sur son site web qu’il ne réagit pas aux signaux « Do Not Track », par lesquels les utilisateurs s’opposent au suivi ("tracking") de leur comportement de navigation par le biais des paramètres de leur navigateur. C’est ce qu’a décidé le tribunal de grande instance de Berlin suite à une plainte de la Fédération allemande des consommateurs (vzbv). Le tribunal a également interdit à l’entreprise de procéder à un réglage par défaut selon lequel le profil du membre est également visible sur d’autres sites web et applications. L’année dernière, le tribunal avait déjà interdit l’envoi d’e-mails non sollicités à des non-membres.

    « Lorsque les consommateurs activent la fonction ’Do Not Track’ de leur navigateur, ils envoient un message clair : ils ne veulent pas que leur comportement de navigation soit espionné à des fins publicitaires ou autres », explique Rosemarie Rodden, conseillère juridique de la vzbv. « Les exploitants de sites web doivent respecter ce signal ».

    #donotrack #do_not_track #publicité #tracking

  • Des clichés et des injonctions sexistes, des effets de la pollution publicitaire

    En introduction, les auteurs et autrices abordent « la diffusion de stéréotypes et d’injonctions sexistes », les procédés utilisés, la soi-disant auto-régulation de l’industrie publicitaire, les représentations dégradantes de la personne, l’histoire du publisexisme, des pistes de travail et des revendications…

    Elles et ils proposent des définitions, distinguent sexisme et misogynie. Iels rappellent que « le sexisme désigne un ensemble d’institutions, de représentations et de dispositions collectives qui produisent et reproduisent un monde dont les femmes sont exclues, ou dans lequel elles sont maintenues en position inférieure » et parlent de fait social, de système discriminatoire…

    Le sexisme dans la publicité française. Rapport de l’Observatoire de la publicité sexiste·2019 – 2020

    https://entreleslignesentrelesmots.wordpress.com/2021/02/10/des-cliches-et-des-injonctions-sexistes-des-ef

    #féminisme #publicité #sexisme

  • Questioning French Federation Partnership
    https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/questioning-french-federation-partnership/vymrLIfA

    La FFE a récemment annoncé son partenariat avec Immortal game, vantant « une plateforme française, [...] avec laquelle nous partageons les mêmes valeurs et objectifs. »

    Or, Immortal Game est une entreprise privée dont un des aspects centraux porte sur les cryptomonnaies et les NFTs. Ces actifs sont actuellement dans le viseur des autorités en Europe et aux États-Unis, notamment à cause d’innombrables fraudes et arnaques du secteur qui visent souvent les personnes les plus vulnérables, ces mêmes personnes que la FFE se doit tout particulièrement de protéger.

    À l’opposé de tout cela, lichess.org est une association française loi 1901 qui fonctionne grâce aux bénévoles et aux dons depuis plus de dix ans. C’est le serveur d’échecs numéro un en France et deux dans le monde, et toutes nos fonctionnalités sont accessibles gratuitement et pour tous, sans aucune publicité ou traqueur.

    Tous nos logiciels sont libres/open-source, c’est-à-dire qu’ils peuvent être réutilisés, partagés et améliorés gratuitement. L’État recommande d’utiliser des logiciels libres.

    A l’aune de ces éléments, les valeurs communes citées par la fédération sont loin d’être évidentes.

    Nous sommes convaincus que les joueurs méritent mieux. Nous nous étonnons également de ne pas avoir été contacté malgré de précédentes collaborations et questionnons l’opacité entourant cette désignation.

  • « La clandestinité a toujours fait partie des accessoires du pouvoir aristocratique (...) À l’opposé, le principe de la démocratie est lié à celui de la #publicité, et, dans le même esprit, à la tendance à proclamer des lois universelles et fondamentales. Car celles-ci s’appliquent à un nombre illimité de sujets et sont donc publiques dans leur essence. À l’inverse, l’utilisation du secret à l’intérieur du régime aristocratique n’est que la forme exacerbée de cette exclusion et de ces privilèges sociaux, pour l’amour desquels l’aristocratie répugne d’ordinaire à promulguer des lois fondées sur des principes universels. »_

    Georg Simmel, #Secret et sociétés secrètes, Circé, 1996, p. 92).

  • Deepfakes of Chinese influencers are livestreaming 24/7 | MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/19/1079832/chinese-ecommerce-deepfakes-livestream-influencers-ai

    Scroll through the livestreaming videos at 4 a.m. on Taobao, China’s most popular e-commerce platform, and you’ll find it weirdly busy. While most people are fast asleep, there are still many diligent streamers presenting products to the cameras and offering discounts in the wee hours.

    But if you take a closer look, you may notice that many of these livestream influencers seem slightly robotic. The movement of their lips largely matches what they are saying, but there are always moments when it looks unnatural.

    These streamers are not real: they are AI-generated clones of the real streamers. As technologies that create realistic avatars, voices, and movements get more sophisticated and affordable, the popularity of these deepfakes has exploded across China’s e-commerce streaming platforms.

    Today, livestreaming is the dominant marketing channel for traditional and digital brands in China. Influencers on Taobao, Douyin, Kuaishou, or other platforms can broker massive deals in a few hours. The top names can sell more than a billion dollars’ worth of goods in one night and gain royalty status just like big movie stars. But at the same time, training livestream hosts, retaining them, and figuring out the technical details of broadcasting comes with a significant cost for smaller brands. It’s much cheaper to automate the job.

    The technology has mostly been known for its problematic use in revenge porn, identity scams, and political misinformation. While there have been attempts to commercialize it in more innocuous ways, it has always remained a novelty. But now, Chinese AI companies have found a new use case that seems to be going quite well.

    Back then, Silicon Intelligence needed 30 minutes of training videos to generate a digital clone that could speak and act like a human. The next year, it was 10 minutes, then three, and now only one minute of video is needed.

    And as the tech has improved, the service has gotten cheaper too. Generating a basic AI clone now costs a customer about 8,000 RMB ($1,100). If the client wants to create a more complicated and capable streamer, the price can go up to several thousands of dollars. Other than the generation, that fee also covers a year of maintenance.

    Once the avatar is generated, its mouth and body move in time with the scripted audio. While the scripts were once pre-written by humans, companies are now using large language models to generate them too.

    Now, all the human workers have to do is input basic information such as the name and price of the product being sold, proofread the generated script, and watch the digital influencer go live. A more advanced version of the technology can spot live comments and find matching answers in its database to answer in real time, so it looks as if the AI streamer is actively communicating with the audience. It can even adjust its marketing strategy based on the number of viewers, Sima says.

    These livestream AI clones are trained on the common scripts and gestures seen in e-commerce videos, says Huang Wei, the director of virtual influencer livestreaming business at the Chinese AI company Xiaoice. The company has a database of nearly a hundred pre-designed movements.

    “For example, [when human streamers say] ‘Welcome to my livestream channel. Move your fingers and hit the follow button,’ they are definitely pointing their finger upward, because that’s where the ‘Follow’ button is on the screen of most mobile livestream apps,” says Huang. Similarly, when streamers introduce a new product, they point down—to the shopping cart, where viewers can find all products. Xiaoice’s AI streamers replicate all these common tricks. “We want to make sure the spoken language and the body language are matching. You don’t want it to be talking about the Follow button while it’s clapping its hands. That would look weird,” she says.

    Spun off from Microsoft Software Technology Center Asia in 2020, Xiaoice has always been focused on creating more human-like AI, particularly avatars that are capable of showing emotions. “Traditional e-commerce sites just feel like a shelf of goods to most customers. It’s cold. In livestreaming, there is more emotional connection between the host and the viewers, and they can introduce the products better,” Huang says.

    After piloting with a few clients last year, Xiaoice officially launched its service of generating under-$1,000 digital clones this year; like Silicon Intelligence, Xiaoice only needs human streamers to provide a one-minute video of themselves.

    And like its competitors, Xiaoice clients can spend more to fine-tune the details. For example, Liu Jianhong, a Chinese sports announcer, made an exquisite clone of himself during the 2022 FIFA World Cup to read out the match results and other relevant news on Douyin.

    A cheap replacement for human streamers

    These generated streamers won’t be able to beat the star e-commerce influencers, Huang says, but they are good enough to replace mid-tier ones. Human creators, including those who used their videos to train their AI clones, are already feeling the squeeze from their digital rivals to some extent. It’s harder to get a job as an e-commerce livestream host this year, and the average salary for livestream hosts in China went down 20% compared to 2022, according to the analytics firm iiMedia Research.

    But the potential for companies to complement human work by keeping the livestream going during the hours when fewer people are watching means it’s hard to justify the cost of hiring real streamers.

    That’s already happening. In the post-midnight hours, many of the streaming channels on popular e-commerce platforms like Taobao and JD feature these AI-generated streamers.

    Previous examples have shown that deepfake technologies don’t need to be perfect to deceive viewers. In 2020, a scammer posed as a famous Chinese actor with the aid of crude face-swapping tools and still managed to get thousands of dollars from unsuspecting women who fell in love with his videos.

    “If a company hires 10 livestream hosts, their skill levels are going to vary. Maybe two or three streamers at the top would contribute to 70% to 80% of the total sales,” says Chen Dan, the CEO of Quantum Planet AI, a company that packages technologies like Xiaoice’s and sells them to corporate clients. “A virtual livestream host can replace the rest—six or seven streamers that contribute less and have lower ROI [return on investment] rates. And the costs would come down significantly.”

    Chen says he has witnessed a lot more interest from brands in AI streamers this year, partly because everyone is looking to “降本增效”—lower costs and improve efficiency, the new buzzword among Chinese tech companies as the domestic economy slows down.

    Chen has over 100 clients using Xiaoice’s service now, and these virtual streamers have brokered millions of dollars in sales. One Xiaoice streamer brought in over 10,000 RMB ($1,370) in revenue in just one hour.

    There are still drawbacks, he says. For example, many of his clients are furniture brands, and although the AI is clever enough to speak and use gestures, it can’t really sit on a sofa or lie in a bed, so the streams lack the appeal of real users testing the products.

    The rising popularity of AI-generated livestreams has also caught the attention of video platforms like Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, as well—though it’s taking a different approach than other tech giants. It’s seemingly more concerned with transparency and it said in a May document that all videos generated by AI should be labeled clearly as such on the platform, and that virtual influencers need to be operated by real humans. The platform has always banned the use of recorded videos as livestreams. AI-generated livestreaming, with no recorded footage but also little real-time human input, straddles the line on that rule.

    The Chinese government made several laws in the past two years on synthetic media and generative AI that would apply to the use in e-commerce streaming. But the effects of government and platform regulations remain to be seen, because the technology is still too new to have met serious enforcement.

    For Silicon Intelligence, its next step is to add “emotional intelligence” to the AI streamers, Sima says: “If there are abusive comments, it will be sad; if the products are selling well, it will be happy.” The company is also working on making AI streamers interact and learn from each other.

    The company has had a fascinating and sort of terrifying goal since its beginning: it wants to create “100,000,000 silicon-based laborers” by 2025. For now, Sima says, the company has generated 400,000 virtual streamers. There’s still a long way to go.

    #Intelligence_artificielle #Médias_de_synthèse #Chine #Streamers
    #Commerce_electronique

  • Faux abonnés, faux commentaires ou faux « j’aime » : comment tricher sur Instagram ? François Ruchti, Camille Lanci, Valentin Tombez - RTS - Mise au point
    Le business des influenceurs et influenceuses

    Acheter des abonnés ou des « j’aime » pour paraître plus populaire sur les réseaux sociaux : des sites internet proposent ce type de services pour une poignée de francs suisses. Parmi la clientèle, des personnes actives dans le monde de l’influence, de la politique ou du sport, comme le révèle une enquête de Mise au Point.

    En quelques clics, l’équipe de Mise au Point est virtuellement devenue, avec son profil « Emmalicieuse », l’un des comptes Instagram les plus prometteurs de Suisse romande. Pourtant, sur le profil de cette dernière, rien n’est vrai. Tout est acheté sur des sites internet qui proposent des centaines d’abonnés et des « j’aime » pour quelques euros.

    Pour paraître plus populaire et gonfler son audience, Emmalicieuse a ainsi pu compter sur l’achat de plus de 13’000 abonnés, de milliers de « j’aime » et de milliers de vues pour ses vidéos. Avec un budget total de 300 francs suisses , il a également été possible de lui payer des dizaines de commentaires comme « trop belle la photo » ou encore « j’adore ton look ». Son profil a depuis été effacé.

    Durant l’expérience qui a duré quelques semaines, le compte Emmalicieuse n’a jamais été bloqué par Instagram. Le réseau social prétend pourtant lutter activement contre les abonnés achetés et autres techniques pour gonfler sa notoriété.

    https://scontent-cdg4-3.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-19/331936339_966551758087518_1492022311809588947_n.jpg
    Capture d’écran du profil d’Emmalicieuse [Instagram]

    Sous-traitants basés en Asie
    Parmi les fournisseurs d’abonnés achetés, Marc (Nom connu de la rédaction) , le patron d’une entreprise française spécialisée dans le domaine, a accepté de répondre aux questions de Mise au Point sous couvert d’anonymat.

    "Il y a différents types de qualité d’abonnés, avec plus ou moins de photos et d’éléments pour les rendre plus authentiques. Une fois qu’un client nous fait une commande, nous utilisons des stocks de profils pour générer des « j’aime » ou des commentaires. Généralement, ce ne sont pas de vraies personnes qui cliquent, tout est fabriqué par des réseaux d’ordinateurs et des sous-traitants basés en Asie. Il y a également la possibilité d’obtenir des vrais profils, des vrais abonnés. Ceci est possible grâce à des concours où il est obligatoire de s’abonner à nos clients. Ce service coûte plus cher", révèle-t-il.

    Ces gens veulent crédibiliser leur présence sur les réseaux. Avoir 100 ou 50’000 abonnés, cela fait la différence
    Marc*, le patron d’une entreprise française spécialisée dans le domaine

    Le jeune homme ne souhaite pas donner le nom de ses clients. « Parmi eux, il y a des gens qui souhaitent briller sur les réseaux, qui souhaitent impressionner leurs amis. Ce sont des ’Monsieur et Madame tout le monde’ », explique-t-il au micro de l’émission de la RTS. Avant d’ajouter qu’il y a aussi des politiciens, des influenceurs et de grosses entreprises qui font appel aux services de son entreprise. « Ces gens veulent crédibiliser leur présence sur les réseaux. Avoir 100 ou 50’000 abonnés, cela fait la différence », souligne-t-il.

    Son entreprise est également sollicitée pour se servir de l’algorithme de YouTube. Ces plateformes mettent en avant, comme il l’explique, les vidéos qui ont du succès. Et le succès amène le succès : « Notre service permet de créer de la visibilité. J’ai un client qui achète des dizaines de milliers de vues dès qu’il publie une vidéo. À chaque fois, cela lui permet de mettre en avant sa vidéo. Des vraies personnes finissent par aller voir sa vidéo. Et il fait ainsi facilement un million de vues », poursuit-il.

    Avec Emmalicieuse, la fausse influenceuse de Mise au Point, les abonnés ont été achetés via le site de Marc, mais également sur le site de ses concurrents. Ceci a permis d’identifier précisément un échantillon de 200 profils payants sur Instagram. L’équipe data de la RTS a analysé ces 200 comptes. Ces profils payants sont abonnés à Emmalicieuse, mais également à toute une série de gens bien réels.

    Des sportifs, artistes et politiciens _
    nicocapone.comedy [Instagram]De petites célébrités locales, des entrepreneurs, mais aussi quelques sportifs et artistes ont les mêmes abonnés qu’Emmalicieuse. Sur les 200 profils payants analysés, une cinquantaine suit par exemple le joueur de football Olivier Boumal. On trouve également une politicienne turque, Elvan Işık Gezmiş, membre du Parlement.

    En Suisse, c’est chez des influenceurs vaudois, nicocapone.comedy, qu’on retrouve une partie de notre échantillon de profils payants. Le couple vaudois, connu sur internet, fait régulièrement des apparitions à la télévision. Il affiche officiellement plus de 10 millions d’abonnés sur Instagram.

    Contactées, aucune de ces personnes n’a répondu à nos questions. Attention toutefois : les profils payants analysés se sont peut-être abonnés exceptionnellement gratuitement à ces différentes personnes.

    Sortir du lot *
    Mais pourquoi cette course aux « j’aime », aux abonnés ou aux commentaires ? Certains influenceurs interrogés ont avoué sous couvert d’anonymat utiliser ces artifices afin de sortir du lot et devenir attractifs pour les marques. En Suisse, une personne influenceuse peut déjà gagner plusieurs milliers de francs par mois avec 20 à 30’000 abonnés.

    Avec l’avènement des réseaux sociaux, des agences d’influence ont vu le jour. Ces agences mettent en relation les marques avec des influenceurs. Ils utilisent des outils afin de vérifier l’authenticité des influenceurs, mais la supercherie est parfois très dure à détecter. Hors caméra, des agences d’influenceurs avouent à demi-mot connaître l’ampleur du faux. Cette supercherie ne semble toutefois pas leur poser des problèmes.

    « Si 50% des abonnés d’un instagrammer sont achetés, ce n’est pas si grave. Certains ont plus d’un million de followers... Alors 50% de faux, ça reste 500’000 personnes qui peuvent être touchées, impactées par cette personne. Ca reste très intéressant de faire de la publicité avec ces influenceurs », indique l’une d’entre elles.

    Dans ce monde du faux, entre la course à la notoriété, aux partenariats, aux « j’aime » et aux commentaires, il est difficile de savoir qui joue le jeu sans tricher. Les consommatrices et consommateurs lambda sont donc laissés à eux-mêmes dans la jungle d’Instagram.

    #influenceurs #influenceuses #publicité #sport #politique #notoriété #réseaux_sociaux #blogs #notoriété #profils #abonnements #partenariats #fraude #internet #algorithmes #supercherie

    Source : https://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/14241142-faux-abonnes-faux-commentaires-ou-faux-jaime-comment-tricher-sur-instag

  • Peak social media: The ads machine | Financial Times
    https://www.ft.com/content/3c34d62d-20d3-47e3-b487-8d78edd0d4ac

    This is an audio transcript of the Tech Tonic podcast episode: ‘Peak social media: The ads machine’

    [MUSIC PLAYING]

    Elaine Moore
    So here’s a question. Who does the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, turn to for advice? There was a time when that person was Roger McNamee. He’s a veteran tech investor. And in 2006, he was sitting in his office in Silicon Valley when his phone rang. (Phone ringing)

    Roger McNamee
    I get a phone call from one of Mark’s senior executives who said, “My boss is facing a huge crisis and he needs to talk to somebody who is very experienced but not conflicted. Would you be willing to take a meeting with Mark?”

    Elaine Moore
    McNamee had been putting money into tech start-ups since the 1980s. He knew the scene well. His opinions were respected. Mark Zuckerberg had started Facebook just two years earlier, but his new social media platform was already taking off, gathering millions of users. And Zuckerberg had a big decision to make.

    Roger McNamee
    Mark came by my office. And keep in mind, he was 22. So this was the middle of 2006. He was 22. I was 50. And he looked just like Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, you know, he had the sandals and the skinny jeans, the grey T-shirt, the hoodie. And we opened the meeting by me introducing myself and saying, “Mark, if it has not already happened, either Microsoft or Yahoo is going to offer $1bn for Facebook. And everybody you know — your board of directors, your investors, your employees, your management team, your parents — are gonna tell you, Mark, sell the company. You’ll have $650mn of your own money. You can go out and change the world. Your venture capitalist will offer to back your next company. He’ll tell you it will be better than Facebook. And I’m here to tell you that that’s all garbage.”

    Elaine Moore
    McNamee had already watched several tech companies change the face of the internet. He’d seen Google dominate the search engine and Amazon master online shopping, and he thought Facebook had the potential to turn social networking into something just as big. So he told Zuckerberg, don’t sell — not even for $1bn.

    Roger McNamee
    You’re gonna have the first really huge social media platform that does a really good thing for society, and it’ll only happen if you see this through. If you sell the company, it won’t work that way. He doesn’t say a thing. He goes through a series of thinker poses. He’s obviously thinking really hard about what I said to him, you know, I mean, the presence of an Olympic-class thinker and . . . after five minutes he goes, “What you just said, that story you told, that’s why I’m here. Yahoo’s offered $1bn.” And I said, “Well, do you want to sell the company?” He goes, “I don’t want to disappoint everybody. But no, I don’t want to sell.” And so I explained to him how he could very gracefully explain to everybody that, “Hey, we’re doing really, really well. This is not a good time to sell the company. You signed up to back my vision, and I still believe in my vision, so let’s go for it.” And I was a true believer.

    Elaine Moore
    Zuckerberg didn’t sell. Instead, he went on to turn Facebook from a social network with a few million users into a global giant that ended up connecting 3bn people around the world. And in the process, he turned social media into a moneymaking machine and Facebook into one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world. How did he do it? Well, as he told the US Congress years later: with advertising.

    Orrin Hatch
    Mr Zuckerberg, I remember well your first visit to Capitol Hill back in 2010. You said back then that Facebook would always be free. How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?

    Mark Zuckerberg
    Senator, we run ads.

    [MUSIC PLAYING]

    Elaine Moore
    This is Tech Tonic from the Financial Times. I’m Elaine Moore. This season of the podcast is about the future of social media. I’m asking whether the era of social media — one created by platforms like Facebook more than 15 years ago — is coming to an end. And if so, what comes next? In this episode, how Mark Zuckerberg used ads to turn social networking into a trillion-dollar business and why, after a decade of incredible growth, he now thinks the future of the company lies in a completely different direction.

    [MUSIC PLAYING]

    Advertising powers social media. That’s why the likes of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp are free. But advertising wasn’t always going to be the dominant business model of the internet.

    Ethan Zuckerman
    It seemed really peculiar in the late ‘90s that we were going to use the same business model as, say, print magazines. Everyone felt like advertising was just a very poor compromise. Even in the late ‘90s no one liked it. We just couldn’t make anything else work.

    Elaine Moore
    Ethan Zuckerman is a professor at the University of Massachusetts. He focuses on public policy and media. But back in the ‘90s, he co-founded an internet start-up, a kind of precursor to social media, and it had a problem common to start-ups: how to make money.

    Ethan Zuckerman
    I was one of the founding team for a company called Tripod.com. Tripod was one of the very first user-generated content sites on the web, which is to say our business model was giving people a little bit of internet space with which they could build their own personal homepages. This turned out to be incredibly popular. We had millions and millions of users who wanted their own little piece of the web. They wanted to talk about their hobbies. They wanted to talk about their interests. What they did not want to do was pay.

    Elaine Moore
    Zuckerman and his colleagues hoped people might sign up for a subscription to use their platform. But no one was interested. They thought about some kind of system of micropayments, but that didn’t work either. The only way to make money was to sell space on the platform to advertisers. This led to some interesting early innovations in the world of online advertising, like the one that Zuckerman himself invented: the pop-up ad.

    Ethan Zuckerman
    Advertisers were not completely comfortable with the idea of being on content that didn’t have editorial control. They were very worried that users might say things that were racist or inflammatory or stupid or in some way in conflict with their brands. And so my boss asked me, can you find some way of putting some distance between the advertisement, which we need to survive and the user’s content, which is where we were getting all of our traffic? And in a fit of whatever is the opposite of genius, I came up with the pop-up ad. So the idea was, well, they’re not in the same window anymore. Your homepage is in one window, the ad is in a different window. Everyone will be happy. Spoiler alert: no one was happy.

    Elaine Moore
    If you used the internet in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, pop-up ads were the bane of your existence. Everywhere you went little adverts would appear all over your screen. It was like a game of Whac-A-Mole. You’d have to go around closing them before you could see the web page you were trying to visit. If that rings any bells, Zuckerman is full of remorse for the hassle he inadvertently caused you. By the early 2000s, browsers started to block pop-up ads. They’re now a relic of the ‘90s internet. But other innovations around advertising were more successful. Early internet builders like Zuckerman found that web pages made by users themselves, user-generated content, told you things about their creators. And it turned out that this information was really useful to advertisers.

    Ethan Zuckerman
    We were interested in targeting ads based on the content of a user’s page. We used very primitive, very early machine learning to say this is a page about cars or this is a page about video games, and tried to target based on that. Where it’s gone from here, of course, is it’s gotten vastly more surveillance. The way that ad targeting works now is we follow you all over the web and then we try to make guesses at who you are based on what you do.

    Elaine Moore
    When Facebook came along, it took this idea of targeted advertising to a whole new level. Facebook was attractive to advertisers because it had so many users. That meant a lot of potential customers to see ad, click on links and buy products. But it also had a lot of information about those users. When you signed up for a profile, you provided things like your birthday, your hometown, and your relationship status. Using the like button, you told Facebook all about your interests. But the real turning point came when Facebook started to absorb even more data — tracking the activity of its users, even when they weren’t on Facebook.

    Roger McNamee
    For the longest time, Mark’s view was “I’m only gonna use the data that people give us inside Facebook.” And Facebook gave advertisers access to things they couldn’t get anywhere else — all kinds of emotional and personal data. But in 2013, Mark changed his position.

    Elaine Moore
    For the Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee, Zuckerberg’s decision to start gathering vast amounts of data on users from all over the web was the turning point for Facebook’s business. It could offer advertisers something they couldn’t get anywhere else.

    Roger McNamee
    They essentially went from not having third-party data to having every piece of third-party data imaginable. And with it, the targeting went from whatever it was, which was not good enough, to something that advertisers perceived as absolutely unique, better than anything available anywhere else. And Facebook, because it had more users than anyone else, could credibly argue in 2013 that they could provide an advertiser with the equivalent of the US Super Bowl, 365 days a year. And that changed everything overnight.

    Elaine Moore
    Facebook could build up a comprehensive profile of you, putting you into specific categories of consumer and then offering advertisers the opportunity to put exactly the right adverts tailored to you in front of you when you went online. After his first meeting with Zuckerberg in 2006, McNamee began regularly advising the new founder. He invested in the company and says he helped Zuckerberg recruit Sheryl Sandberg, credited with driving the growth of the ads business. But in recent years, McNamee has started to speak out against Facebook’s data-gathering habits and the way that he believes users can be manipulated by disinformation campaigns that undermine society. He says he tried to warn Facebook.

    Roger McNamee
    I reached out to my former advisees, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, in October of 2016 to warn them because I thought that it would be bad for the company to get a reputation for undermining civil rights and democracy. I don’t think any company wants that. But it turns out that the temptations offered by data and the ability to manipulate people’s choices, they were irresistible because in the end, every time you did one of the things that caused harm, your stock price went up a lot because those things were so profitable. And when I began talking about the harms of Facebook, people looked at me and go, “Roger, what are you talking about? The stock is going up every day.”

    Elaine Moore
    It turned out that using data to sell targeted ads was extremely lucrative. The money poured in. Along with Google, Facebook came to dominate global digital advertising. By 2021, it had become a trillion-dollar company. But lately, there are signs that Facebook’s astonishing growth is faltering. At the end of 2021, the platform’s user base shrank for the first time. Last year, for the first time ever, revenues also fell. It led investors and analysts to wonder: is Facebook running out of steam?

    Facebook turned itself into a social media giant by gathering huge amounts of data and perfecting the digital ads business.

    Steven Levy
    Facebook was able to get an amazing amount of information on people with relatively few inputs.

    Elaine Moore
    Steven Levy has followed Facebook since the beginning. He’s editor-at-large at Wired and spent years embedded with the company for his book Inside Facebook. He says the sophistication of the ads business that Facebook built is extremely impressive.

    Steven Levy
    One turning point was the like button. By simply indicating what pieces of content you liked, Facebook knew an incredible amount about you. One researcher figured out that with 10 likes, Facebook could figure out your political affiliation, your sexual orientation, and other things. With 30 likes, it would know you as well as a friend. With 100 likes, it would know you as well as a close friend. And with a couple hundred likes, it would know you as well as your spouse.

    Elaine Moore
    But today there are questions about whether targeted ads can keep delivering the same level of growth for Facebook. It’s getting harder for companies that rely on this business model to make money. Last year, social media companies saw their share prices plummet. Snap, the company behind Snapchat, fell 80 per cent, and Facebook, now rebranded as Meta, saw its market value fall 64 per cent. In response, Zuckerberg cut thousands of jobs.

    One problem is that there’s been a general downturn in the economy, which means companies have cut back on the money they spend on advertising. But there’s a broader cause for concern — that the endless stream of data gathered from users, the fuel that powers the whole digital advertising machine might be drying up.

    Recently, Apple made a small but significant change to its iPhone privacy settings. Before, apps like Facebook could track user behaviour automatically unless users opted out. Now users were being explicitly asked if they wanted to be targeted for ads. The majority appear to have said no. Meta estimated that this move alone could cost the company $10bn in lost ad revenue.

    Steven Levy
    When Apple made it more difficult for them, that was a blow because I think Facebook came to take it for granted that its . . . our business was inviolable. They thought that they keep raking it in through advertising and they would have that data that no one else had and deliver value to advertisers that no one else could match. And they wouldn’t have to worry about that.

    [MUSIC PLAYING]

    Elaine Moore
    The thing is, Apple changing its privacy settings may not be the last restriction on user data. Over the years, there’s been a growing concern about the amount of information that social media platforms gather. Around the world, regulators want to better police how that data is used. That could mean even less access to data for platforms like Facebook. And as a result, less ad revenue. But some people think there’s an even more fundamental problem — that targeted digital advertising was never as effective as it claimed to be. Maybe the model that helped to build the modern social media economy was always flawed.

    Tim Hwang
    The dream of digital advertising, you know, what Facebook was selling early on was, “Hey, we’re an advertising company, but we’re way better than traditional advertising. I can find the consumer that is just poised to buy your product. I can deliver this message to them at the right place at the right time, and they will go buy the product.” There’s a lot of research to suggest that those things might just fundamentally not be true.

    Elaine Moore
    Tim Hwang used to work for Google, the other major seller of digital ad space along with Facebook. He says the whole idea of targeted advertising — using data to offer effective ads — might be oversold.

    Tim Hwang
    It’s actually unclear whether or not the ad ever, in fact, reaches a person at all. So there’s some data to suggest that basically about 56 per cent of ads are never seen, right? Like it’s delivered to someone’s screen, but they just browse through it. They don’t see it. There’s also a lot of fraud in the system. So it’s actually unclear whether or not that click-through, right, actually belongs to a person or belongs to a bot. So some estimates suggest that even like one out of every $3 spent on the ad ecosystem is fraudulent. Actually, it’s delivered to a bot or delivered to what’s known as a click farm, or someone is sort of paid literally to kind of click on ads.

    Elaine Moore
    Hwang also says that even when ads do reach the right person, it’s not clear they actually encourage that person to buy the product.

    Tim Hwang
    What the advertiser sees is we put money into online ads and a person bought the product. One of the interesting things about those consumers is that they would have bought the product anyways even if you hadn’t advertised to them. And so actually in many cases you’re just targeting consumers that would have purchased anyways.

    Elaine Moore
    But surely digital advertising, it is going towards a more specific group than if you just put an advert into a newspaper?

    Tim Hwang
    Well, I would actually even challenge that as well. There’s a study that basically suggests about 41 per cent of ad data may be inaccurate. So, you know, the dream is, hey, you can target Tim Hwang. He’s a male, 25 to 35, you know, living on the East Coast of the United States. When actually the ad arrives, it turns out you’re targeting female, 75 to 95, living in the UK. And so I think there actually is real questions even about the veracity of the data collected and whether or not, in fact, you are getting better results.

    Elaine Moore
    Hwang thinks the entire digital advertising industry is in a bit of a bubble, and he says the current troubles in the ads market — advertisers spending less, worries about access to user data — could expose that.

    You talk about this idea that the digital advertising ecosystem is at risk of collapsing or potentially is about to collapse. Why is that happening right now?

    Tim Hwang
    So I think there’s a couple of things. First one is just the larger macroeconomic environment. The sort of downward pressure on the global economy is causing a lot of industries to pull back on their advertising spend. There’s kind of a question about, like, once you cut all this ad spend, is there actually a change in the bottom line of these businesses? That’s one thing that could really shake the confidence of the industry is, like, what was all this advertising for? If when we cut budgets, there’s not really a huge material impact on our outcomes.

    I think the second one that I’ll point out is that there is indeed a big push both on the government side, right, through, say, the EU GDPR or California’s CPRA, and also on the company side, right. Like Apple is increasingly implementing all of these privacy rules. And the worry that you’ve heard from the ad industry is, OK, well, once we lose access to all this data, we just won’t be able to get ads to work as well anymore. And they think we’re about to run this really big experiment, which is, is that the case? Are we actually gonna live in a world where, like, ads are way less effective than they used to be? We may just discover that, like, actually we didn’t need all this data to begin with for ads and that programmatic advertising might have been built on kind of the dream of targeted ads more than the reality.

    Elaine Moore
    Even if the digital ads market doesn’t crash, as Tim Hwang says it might, it’s no longer providing Facebook with the same levels of growth it once did. The Facebook platform is reaching saturation. It has nearly 3bn monthly active users around the world, but it looks like that might be the limit. Steven Levy, who wrote a book about Facebook, says this is a real problem for Mark Zuckerberg, who he says has been obsessed with growth above everything else since the beginning.

    Steven Levy
    There’s only so many billions of people on Earth. You can’t get to the people in China, which is the biggest user of the internet and social media in the world. And the last couple of billion are really, really hard to reach. They don’t have much money. And even if you got them on social media, they couldn’t deliver you much profits. So when he goes to Wall Street and announces that there’s no growth, the stock goes down, sometimes dramatically. Without growth, he’s in trouble.

    Elaine Moore
    Levy says this search for growth explains one of the biggest decisions Mark Zuckerberg has ever made. In 2021, he took his company, the most successful social media company in the world, and changed its name from Facebook to Meta. He announced that the company’s focus was now on building the metaverse.

    Mark Zuckerberg
    We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet. We’ll be able to feel present like we’re right there with people, no matter how far apart we actually are. We’ll be able to express ourselves in new, joyful, completely immersive ways, and that’s going to unlock a lot of amazing new experiences.

    Steven Levy
    Zuckerberg’s holy grail is to move our social media to the metaverse. It makes sense if you’re obsessed with growth as the pillar of the way you operate a business, then when you can’t keep growing at the rate you were and you are really reaching the ceiling, move to someplace new where you could start from scratch and then grow billions from a few thousand rather than try to eke out the last billion or so.

    Elaine Moore
    Zuckerberg envisions repeating the success of Facebook in a completely new realm, with users wearing Meta VR headsets to access Meta-run virtual worlds.

    Meta video clip
    Oh, hey, Mark . . . Hey, what’s going on? Hey, Mark . . . Hi . . . What’s up, Mark? Whoa, we’re floating in space? Uh-huh. Who made this place? It’s awesome . . . This place is amazing.

    Elaine Moore
    Right now, the jury is still out on whether this huge bet will pay off. So far, take-up has been slow and costs have been high. Operating losses attributed to Meta’s Reality Labs — the part of the company working on the metaverse — exceed $37bn. But there are questions about whether any of us really want to spend our time wearing bulky VR headsets. If Zuckerberg is right, then maybe the future of social media will be in the metaverse. But in the meantime, Levy says all that time and money is adding to a sense that the old Facebook social media platform is stagnating. Not only is it not growing at the same pace, he says, it’s not innovating either.

    Steven Levy
    You could argue that the social media site has not been particularly innovative for probably a decade. They have generally been mimicking what seems popular in social media at the moment. So Snapchat comes up and Facebook, after unsuccessfully trying to buy it, comes up with a clone. Snapchat comes up with its stories feature, Facebook successfully copies that, first in Instagram, then in Facebook. Clubhouse, which is an audio-only social media product, looked like it was exciting and it’s going to be a big thing. And Facebook came up with its own version, right? You really would be hard-pressed to name a breakthrough product in social media in the last decade that Facebook came up with on its own.

    Elaine Moore
    Levy says Zuckerberg’s focus on the metaverse isn’t helping with this lack of innovation. He says all the talented people at Meta are working on metaverse projects rather than how to make the existing social media platforms better. So has Zuckerberg given up on Facebook?

    Steven Levy
    Well, Zuckerberg would never say that he has given up on Facebook, but he should be thinking just as innovatively in the social media as he is in the metaverse. It is a social media company. Its revenues come from social media. And if I were running that company, it would seem to me that my challenge would be to bring innovation to social media. And I don’t think that’s impossible. Maybe if that was your focus, they say, how can we reinvent social media without having to put a headset on but use just the tools of mobile and this connectedness to come up with something new like TikTok did. Maybe that would be the path for Meta.

    Elaine Moore
    If you want an example of peak social media, Facebook might be it. The breadth of its social connections will be hard for any company to ever replicate. But for many of us, it’s no longer engaging. Its ads business is less robust these days, and there are questions about its appeal to younger users. Even the man who made it all happen, Mark Zuckerberg, is more keen to talk about AI and VR than Facebook communities.

    Whether we do or choose to one day live in the metaverse or not, Facebook’s reign as the most important social media platform in the world may be over. But despite this, it’s worth remembering that Facebook is still the biggest social media platform by far. If this is the beginning of its decline, Facebook watchers say that it’s likely to be a long and slow one. And that might be true of social media as a whole.

    Steven Levy
    Well, giant platforms just don’t go away all at once. They slowly fade. But ultimately, I think people are questioning whether the social media era where social media is, like, a dominant force, is coming to an end where it’ll still exist but no longer be the growth platforms. So there is a sense that social media has sort of reached the end of its innovation and growth stage.

    Elaine Moore
    In the next episode of Tech Tonic, social media is supposed to be fun, but maybe it’s just not good for us.

    Emma Lembke
    Why? Like, why is it that my phone has so much control over me? How am I allowing it to do that? And why is no one speaking up about this?

    Elaine Moore
    US lawmakers are worried that social media is harming us and young people in particular. What does that mean for the future of the platforms?

    Katie Paul
    Kids are a huge market for these companies and it will really cut into their bottom line if they can no longer collect these data points on children.

    [MUSIC PLAYING]

    Elaine Moore
    You’ve been listening to Tech Tonic from the Financial Times with me, Elaine Moore. The producer is Josh Gabert-Doyon, and the senior producer is Edwin Lane. Manuela Saragosa is executive producer. Sound design is by Breen Turner and Samantha Giovinco. Original scoring by Metaphor Music.

    And before you go, we’re keen to hear more from our listeners about this show, and we want to know what you’d like to hear more of. So we’re running a survey which you can find at ft.com/techtonicsurvey. It takes around 10 minutes to complete, and we’d appreciate your feedback.

    [MUSIC PLAYING]

    #Publicité #Tim_Hwang #Médias_sociaux #Facebook

  • YouTube test threatens to block viewers if they continue using ad blockers
    https://www.engadget.com/youtube-test-threatens-to-block-viewers-if-they-continue-using-ad-blockers
    https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/iNClM5RS.M9Onb_34VaW0Q--~B/Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTYzMDtweW9mZj0wO3c9MTIwMDthcHBpZD15dGFjaHlvbg--/https://media-mbst-pub-ue1.s3.amazonaws.com/creatr-images/2019-04/ddd07510-5afe-11e9-a7fd-df8c0956efd4.cf.webp

    Mariella Moon
    Mariella Moon|@mariella_moon|June 30, 2023 1:31 AM

    YouTube is looking to take a more aggressive approach in preventing viewers from using ad blockers while watching videos on its platform. As BleepingComputer reports, people have been posting screenshots on social networks like Reddit that show a pop-up notice warning them that their player will be blocked after three videos.

    The warning says YouTube will block their ability to play videos on the platform unless they disable their ad blocker or add the website to their white list. “Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide,” the notice continues. To go ad-free, the company tells users to get a YouTube Premium subscription so “creators can still get paid.” Prior to these warnings, YouTube only showed popups to ad blocker users, reminding them that it’s against the website’s TOS. Eventually, it added a timer to the notices to ensure viewers take the time to read them.

    The website has confirmed to BleepingComputer that the new alerts are part of an experiment. A spokesperson told the publication that YouTube is “running a small experiment globally that urges viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium.” They said that YouTube might temporarily disable playback “[i]n extreme cases, where viewers continue their use of ad blockers.” The spokesperson added that they will only disable playback “if viewers ignore repeated requests to allow ads on YouTube,” though it’s unclear if that means YouTube won’t automatically block playback after a viewer watches three videos and will give them more opportunities to comply.

    At the moment, this new approach only affects a small number of users, and YouTube didn’t say how many people and regions are part of the test. The website, which makes most of its money from ads, has seen its ad revenue decline over the past three quarters, so we won’t be surprised if this test expands to more users around the world should it turn out to be effective.

    #YouTube #Publicité

  • Come la morsa monopolistica di #Amazon danneggia i venditori indipendenti europei

    Il colosso dell’ecommerce esercita un potere enorme anche sui piccoli rivenditori, giocando al tempo stesso da intermediario, fornitore di servizi e concorrente. Dalle sole commissioni fatte pagare nel 2022 agli attori indipendenti europei ha ricavato 23,5 miliardi di euro. Un report di Somo ne fotografa la posizione dominante oggi

    Amazon soffoca i venditori indipendenti europei costringendoli ad acquistare i suoi servizi a tariffe sempre più elevate e imponendo loro condizioni abusive. È la morsa del colosso ben descritta nel report “Amazon’s European chokehold” (https://www.somo.nl/amazons-european-chokehold/#printing-Amazon%26%238217%3Bs%20European%20chokehold) pubblicato a giugno da Somo, il Centro di ricerca olandese sulle multinazionali. “Amazon ha conquistato l’Europa. Dopo un’espansione durata 20 anni, intensificata durante la pandemia da Covid-19, il gigante statunitense è ora di gran lunga l’azienda di ecommerce dominante in Germania, Regno Unito, Francia, Italia e Spagna -si legge nel rapporto–. In questi Paesi l’azienda è il principale approdo per gli acquirenti online. E questo l’ha resa quasi indispensabile per i venditori indipendenti che desiderano distribuire i propri prodotti in Rete”.

    I ricercatori di Somo hanno analizzato la complessa struttura di Amazon in Europa, tracciando l’andamento dei prezzi dei prodotti venduti sulla piattaforma ed esaminando la “giurisprudenza” delle autorità europee chiamati a regolare la concorrenza. Dal lavoro di analisi è emerso che Amazon nel 2022 ha incassato 23,5 miliardi di euro solo in commissioni di servizio, cifra triplicata rispetto al 2017 (7,6 miliardi di euro). Le commissioni includono l’inserimento negli elenchi della piattaforma, i costi di consegna e di assistenza.

    “Amazon sostiene che questo aumento sia dovuto al maggior volume di vendite. L’azienda, però, si rifiuta di fornire dati concreti ma ha affermato che nei due anni precedenti al 2021 il numero di prodotti venduti da negozi indipendenti sarebbe aumentato del 65% -continuano i ricercatori-. Tuttavia si tratta di una percentuale nettamente inferiore all’incremento dei ricavi che Amazon ha ottenuto dalle inserzioni e dalla logistica dei venditori. L’aumento degli acquisti non spiega quindi l’intero valore dei ricavi che è dovuto anche a un’impennata delle tariffe”.

    La situazione evolve ulteriormente se si considerano i ricavi pubblicitari. Nel 2021 le entrate dalle inserzioni da venditori indipendenti europei sono state pari a 2,75 miliardi di euro. Dal 2017 i guadagni da inserzioni della piattaforma in Europa sono aumentati di 17 volte. Per un totale, indipendenti e non, di 24,95 miliardi di euro nel corso del 2021. Di conseguenza il “Marketplace” della piattaforma è talmente grande che se dovesse essere scorporato dall’azienda madre diventerebbe immediatamente la terza azienda tecnologica per profitti in Europa.

    “Servizi come la consegna e la pubblicità sono teoricamente opzionali. Tuttavia Amazon ha usato il suo potere per renderli quasi indispensabili, sostenendo la loro importanza per il raggiungimento di visibilità e vendite -è il risultato della ricerca di Somo-. Negli ultimi anni la piattaforma ha mantenuto alte le tariffe (nel caso delle inserzioni) o le ha aumentate (ad esempio, per la consegna e il magazzino). L’analisi dei prezzi di consegna e stoccaggio dal 2017 al 2023 in Germania, Regno Unito, Francia, Italia e Spagna mostra che Amazon ha aumentato continuamente i costi di questi servizi”. Entrando nel dettaglio, tra il 2017 e il 2023 le tariffe sono aumentate da un minimo del 50% in Spagna e Germania fino al 98% in Italia e al 115% in Francia.

    L’aumento delle tariffe per i servizi di consegna e stoccaggio e dei costi pubblicitari ha fatto sì che crescesse anche la quota di Amazon sul venduto dei “clienti”. Secondo una ricerca di Marketplace Pulse, azienda specializzata in analisi dell’ecommerce, il gigante statunitense tratterrebbe in media il 50% sul venduto. Una quota che è aumentata del 10% negli ultimi cinque anni. “Queste tariffe stanno schiacciando i venditori che, tolte le spese di inserzione, consegna e pubblicità, hanno margini molto ristretti per pagare la merce venduta, i dipendenti e tutti gli altri costi generali. Qualcosa inevitabilmente deve cedere: o i venditori cessano l’attività a causa della diminuzione dei margini oppure aumentano i prezzi, contribuendo potenzialmente a creare tendenze inflazionistiche in tutto il mercato”, è l’allarme di Somo.

    Le autorità regolatorie della concorrenza e del mercato di Europa e Regno Unito stanno indagando sull’azienda per verificare un possibile abuso di posizione dominante. Secondo Somo le indagini effettuate in Italia e nell’Unione europea avrebbero dimostrato come Amazon abbia usato i dati ottenuti dai venditori per competere con gli stessi, costringendoli di conseguenza ad acquistare i servizi offerti dalla piattaforma per rimanere competitivi. A prezzi, come detto, sempre più elevati.

    Secondo Somo l’origine del potere monopolistico di Amazon sarebbe di natura strutturale e difficile da comprendere senza analizzare il suo modello di business. Nata come piattaforma per la vendita di libri online, ha in seguito ampliato la varietà di prodotti che distribuiva e aperto anche a venditori terzi.

    Il passo successivo è stato quello di fornire ai rivenditori attivi sulla piattaforma dei servizi aggiuntivi, che comprendono appunto logistica e pubblicità. Allo stesso tempo ha iniziato a vendere i propri prodotti. In questo processo Amazon ha assunto tre ruoli diversi e in potenziale conflitto di interessi. Agisce infatti come intermediario sul mercato, stabilendone regole e determinandone i prezzi, come venditore, in concorrenza con coloro che utilizzano la piattaforma per distribuire i propri prodotti, e come fornitore di servizi per la vendita online.

    “Nonostante l’accresciuto controllo da parte delle autorità garanti della concorrenza in tutta l’Ue, non è stato ancora affrontato il conflitto di interessi che è alla base del potere monopolistico e della ricchezza di Amazon -conclude Somo-. Le autorità per la concorrenza e i responsabili politici europei devono regolamentare rigorosamente l’azienda come un servizio di pubblica utilità, oppure suddividere le sue diverse attività per evitare conflitti di interesse tra il suo ruolo di intermediario della piattaforma, venditore e fornitore di servizi”.
    Da segnalare infine che Somo ha aperto una specie di “canale” di comunicazione con i rivenditori su Amazon per raccogliere segnalazioni, istanze, richieste di aiuto. “Vorremmo conoscere la vostra esperienza di utilizzo della piattaforma e raccogliere ulteriori dati sul trattamento riservato da Amazon ai venditori. Contattateci in modo privato e sicuro tramite Publeaks o via mail criptata all’indirizzo margaridarsilva@protonmail.com“. Un modo per uscire dalla morsa.

    https://altreconomia.it/come-la-morsa-monopolistica-di-amazon-danneggia-i-venditori-indipendent
    #économie #monopole #multinationales #commerce_en_ligne #Marketplace #publicité

    • Amazon’s European chokehold

      Independent sellers and the economy under Amazon’s monopoly power

      This research reveals the immense market power of Amazon in Europe and the revenue it derives from it. In most of Europe’s biggest economies, Amazon is the main route for independent businesses to access online shoppers. Amazon’s dominance allows the company to get away with extractive and exploitative treatment of sellers on its platform.

      By analysing Amazon’s corporate structure in Europe, its financial reports, and the findings of competition investigations, SOMO found that:

      – In 2022, Amazon raked in €23.5 billion in listing and logistics fees from independent sellers in Europe. This was more than triple the €7.6 billion in 2017.
      – To this, Amazon added an estimated €2.75 billion in advertising revenue from independent sellers in 2021. Since 2017, Amazon’s overall European advertising revenue has grown 17-fold.
      - Altogether, in 2021 Amazon’s revenue from European sellers amounted to €24.95 billion. Amazon’s European marketplace is so large, if it were spun off into a separate company, the new firm would immediately become Europe’s third-biggest tech company by revenue.
      - In this period, Amazon has also continuously increased the price of logistics services. The increases varied, but they could be as high as more than double in some categories.

      Dominant platform

      “For the past 20 years, Amazon has been expanding its monopolistic hold over online shopping in Europe. It is now so dominant that independent retailers who wish to sell online cannot avoid it. Sellers are locked into the platform and are essentially a captive clientele, making them a profitable source of monopoly rent”, says Margarida Silva, researcher at SOMO.

      Amazon argues that the increase in fee revenue results from more sales. However, the numbers the company provides show a slower rise in sales than the increase in the fees that Amazon charged from sellers. Higher sales are only part of the story. In this period, prices for services such as logistics (Fulfillment by Amazon) have been constantly raised, and advertising was made essential to achieve visibility and sales.
      Under investigation

      Competition authorities across Europe, including in Italy, the EU and the UK, have started probing the company for abuses of its dominance. The EU and Italian investigations show the company used sellers’ data to compete against them and pushed them into buying logistics services. A similar investigation is ongoing in the UK.

      In Germany, Amazon has long been the focus of the Bundeskartellamt. Already in 2013, the agency forced the company to remove price parity clauses from its contracts with sellers. It is again investigating whether the company is reproducing the price parity policy via its automated tools.
      Monopoly power

      Despite increased scrutiny from competition authorities across the EU, the conflict of interests that lies at the root of Amazon’s monopoly power and wealth has not been addressed.

      European competition authorities and policy-makers must either strictly regulate Amazon as a public utility or break up its different businesses to prevent conflicts of interest between its role as a platform intermediary, seller, and service provider.

      “To achieve a fair digital transition, European regulators need to break up the excessive market power wielded by corporations like Amazon. Europe needs to sharpen its antitrust tools, revive structural solutions and put them to work”, says Margarida Silva.

      https://www.somo.nl/amazons-european-chokehold/#printing-Amazon%26%238217%3Bs%20European%20chokehold

      #rapport

  • C’est la journée de girafe !
    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahinter_steckt_immer_ein_kluger_Kopf


    Dahinter steckt immer ein kluger Kopf
    Nadja Auermann, Berlin, Deutschland, 1997 © Alfred Seiland / F.A.Z.

    https://photography-now.com/exhibition/105233

    Alfred Seiland
    „Dahinter steckt immer ein kluger Kopf. 1995-2001“

    Ausstellung: 30. Januar bis 13. März 2015
    Eröffnung: 30. Januar, 18-21 Uhr

    „Dahinter steckt immer ein kluger Kopf“ ist der Titel der langjährigen und noch immer laufenden Werbekampagne der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, für die Alfred Seiland von 1995 bis 2001 zahlreiche Persönlichkeiten mit, beziehungsweise hinter, der Tageszeitung photographiert hat. Die Repräsentanz der Villa Grisebach in Düsseldorf freut sich, in Kooperation mit Kicken Berlin, anläßlich des Düsseldorf Photo Weekend eine Auswahl seiner Photographien „Kluger Köpfe“ zeigen zu können. Die intelligent inszenierten Bilder verraten durch ihren jeweiligen Kontext etwas über die Portraitierten.

    Alfred Seiland wurde für diese Arbeit vielfach ausgezeichnet, u. a. mit der Goldmedaille des Art Directors Club New York, dem Pro Prize, Epica d’Or und dem Lead Award. Er ist mit seinen Werken auch in zahlreichen Sammlungen vertreten, wie beispielsweise im Museum of Modern Art in New York oder auch in der Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Er ist Professor für Photographie an der Stuttgarter Akademie der Bildenden Künste.

    #publicité #girafe

  • #smartphone Cet appareil qui tue en classe Sophie Godbout - Le Devoir

    Depuis le début de 2023, trois études québécoises (dont celle du centre de recherche du CHU Sainte-Justine) ont démontré les effets négatifs des médias sociaux sur les jeunes : mauvaise estime de soi, anxiété, dépression et même suicide…

    Monsieur Drainville, je vous en révèle davantage, comme si ce n’était pas suffisant.

    Il est 8 h, j’entre en classe pour m’installer. Plusieurs élèves sont déjà arrivés, mais c’est le silence. Ils sont tous rivés à leur appareil et ne lèvent même pas les yeux pour me saluer. Ils ne se parlent pas : ils regardent leur écran. C’est magique comme ils sont tranquilles et silencieux en cet instant… Aucun échange, que le silence. Chaque fois, je m’étonne qu’on ait crié haut et fort que les jeunes devaient revenir à l’école pour socialiser lors de la pandémie. Je dois dire que ce bout m’échappe parce que, presque tous les matins, ça recommence… C’est une victime, la socialisation, de ce supposé outil de communication. Et si les élèves se parlent, le sujet, c’est le contenu, la vidéo qu’ils regardent.


    Une autre victime : la langue. Les contenus écoutés sont en anglais. En soi, ce n’est pas mauvais. Mais lorsqu’on ne lit plus le français et que l’activité de la soirée est de consulter son téléphone, il ne faut pas se surprendre que le vocabulaire des adolescents diminue et de voir « exercise » couramment dans les copies. La syntaxe y goûte également. Les tournures de phrase ont un penchant pour l’anglais… Lire entre les lignes, les inférences, devient également un problème lorsqu’on ne sait pas lire par manque de pratique.

    Avez-vous déjà tenté de courir un marathon sans entraînement ? L’anxiété peut bien plafonner… face à l’épreuve ! On voit également apparaître beaucoup de plans d’intervention avec des outils comme le dictionnaire électronique ou Lexibar qui sont des prédicteurs de mots, comme lorsqu’on utilise son téléphone… Hasard ou conséquence ? Je dois aider les élèves, au secondaire, à chercher dans le dictionnaire. Triste situation ! Alors, on leur permet de consulter Usito sur leur téléphone. Pourquoi pas ? C’est beaucoup plus rapide, moins exigeant et ils ont tous un téléphone, même ceux qui n’en auraient pas le moyen. C’est essentiel, voyons !

    Ce préambule sur la nécessité du portable me permet d’introduire une troisième victime : l’autonomie, qualité essentielle à la vie adulte. Les parents savent où est leur enfant et peuvent le joindre à tout moment. La joie ! Même pendant les heures de cours, les parents textent. J’ai même déjà répondu à un parent qui avait appelé pendant le cours. Charmant comme attention d’appeler à cette heure pour parler à son fils ! Il n’y a pas de limite à cette omniprésence, et la communication se fait à tout moment : on peut appeler maman ou papa pour se faire rassurer si ça ne va pas bien, pour l’avertir d’une mauvaise note avant qu’elle n’apparaisse en ligne ou pour se faire consoler de cette note.

    Partout, partout, tout le temps ! Il est rassurant de savoir où se trouve notre enfant et de pouvoir le joindre en tout temps, mais à quel moment apprendra-t-il à se débrouiller ? Je vous rappelle qu’il est à l’école, pas dans la brousse ou la jungle. Il doit quitter l’école pour revenir à la maison ? Je pense que, dans l’ensemble, les jeunes devraient y arriver. Il peut arriver un malheur ? Je peux vous rassurer, nous avons survécu, et ce, pour plusieurs générations… Je vous suggère de souper tous ensemble, sans vos téléphones, et de parler du déroulement de vos journées : vous serez informés et développerez la socialisation, le tour de parole, la patience, le respect, l’empathie, et j’en passe…

    Je m’arrête ici, car je pourrais écrire des lignes et des lignes. La situation est inquiétante, d’autant plus que les téléphones, ce sont nous, les adultes, qui les offrons. À qui rendons-nous service et procurons-nous la tranquillité ? Et le pire est à venir : l’IA pensera pour eux…

    #médias_sociaux #enfants #suicide #estime_de_soi #anxiété #dépression #suicide #socialisation #téléphones #ia #tiktok #facebook #bytedance #surveillance #instagram #algorithme #twitter #wechat #publicité #apple #youtube

    Source : https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/idees/792326/education-cet-appareil-qui-tue-en-classe

  • La faillite de « Vice », le groupe de médias américain
    https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2023/05/15/la-faillite-de-vice-le-groupe-de-medias-americain_6173421_3234.html

    Le groupe de médias d’information américain Vice s’est déclaré en faillite. Dans un contexte de recul du marché publicitaire, cette annonce était attendue sur le marché depuis quelques semaines. Un consortium, dont la société d’investissement Fortress Investment Group, le principal créancier de Vice, va prendre le contrôle du groupe pour 225 millions de dollars, sauf offre supérieure par d’autres parties, selon le communiqué publié lundi 15 mai.

    Vice Media Group, qui avait été valorisé 5,7 milliards de dollars en 2017, produit des contenus dans 25 langues, avec plus d’une trentaine de bureaux dans le monde. Le groupe de médias, à l’accès gratuit, s’appuie principalement sur la publicité pour générer des revenus. Mais avec la dégradation de la conjoncture économique, le marché publicitaire s’est tendu, pour être majoritairement capté par les géants technologiques, comme Google et Facebook . Vice poursuivra ses activités durant toute la procédure, précise le média.

    Tiens, c’est exactement ce que dénonce Tim Hwang dans son livre "Le grand krach de l’attention"

    #Vice #Publicité #Captation #Tim_Hwang

  • #Google continue à mélanger #publicité et vidéos climatosceptiques
    https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/gafam-google-continue-a-melanger-publicite-et-videos-climatos

    Le géant de la tech s’était engagé en 2021 à ne plus afficher de pub au côté de contenus niant l’urgence climatique. Mais YouTube associe toujours des annonceurs classiques à des vidéos contestant le réchauffement climatique, dénonce “The New York Times”.

    Google Promised to Defund Climate Lies, but the Ads Keep Coming - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/technology/google-youtube-disinformation-climate-change.html

    #climat