“You will miss the worlds most important news if you don’t click on this article right now”

If you fell for the title then I think I am successful in selling you and you are a commodity now .. . Period.” – Me

These are type of strings that are run over and over again on web. and everyone has fallen for these. sometime in our life – Is this a SCAM ? Have not yet understood, lets discuss …

What is the whole point of paying web search engines to show strings like “You wont believe how these celebrities look like now / then / ever etc ..” or “5/10/15 ….ways you didn’t know you could make money”. I don’t know why but even though the titles seem so dumb but somehow I always think of clicking on them. So have you ever thought :

• what these entities are, which pay for these fancy posts ?

• how do these entities make a revenue showing us such articles and unreliable news ?

• If you search on web, why you only have few results about these companies ? Does nobody know anything about it?

Things you would like to know:

These entities creates the boxes like Around The Web, Recommendation For You, As per your interest etc , at the bottom of many webpages. Additionally, it recommends video content or user curated content.

These entities are used by content publishers to encourage users to view more articles on the same site, or to gain revenues for referral traffic. Marketers and brands bid for views of their content. These entities provides approximately billions of article recommendations each month. It is implemented on a website with a line of Javascript.

Now to the interesting part:

These entities records the content that user is viewing i.e. the content’s length, metadata, the user’s history, and other factors. This data is then used to analyse the users interests , which in turn is used to advertise products or content .

But, to do this have they taken your cookie preferences ? Is this legally permissible ? Why no one has sued them till now ? ….

So Simply the steps are:

STEP 1 : Show us random articles

STEP 2: Record what content/articles we clicked on

STEP 3: Analyse the data and provide intelligence to companies. to us

STEP 4: In turn companies that advertise give money to them

And thats how it influence us by using our precious data and suddenly we become saleable commodity. We are sold and they earn billions of dollars a year.

I would call it the worlds fastest growing business, where we are the commodity and that we did not know about …

Critics argue that services like these are used for clickbait or fake news. An analysis conducted by various agencies found that a high percent of sponsored links on these type of services were clickbait.

If nothing shows up about these multi-billion dollar company on web it indicates how they may be manipulating the internet. One thing is very clear they promote. inappropriate content just to gain the users data. Thus it is important that we don’t fall for the these traps and keep away from it as much as possible.

Stay aware , stay safe, happy browsing.