Last year Facebook made $2 Billion and that is expected to double each year for the next few years. Also nearly one-third of all ads that were put online were displayed on Facebook. This is simply because we are willing to give up tons of information that we would normally be turned off by if an advertiser asked for it but because we have "friends" on Facebook who we think will be the only ones looking at our profiles.
Yes it is scary that we are being individual targeted by advertisers because we are willing to give up so much information that we would normally not give out, but is there an actual benefit to this for some people.
I recently read an article about small business owners who claim that they owe their business to Facebook because of advertising. Small business owners have the ability to take out an ad on Facebook and target the people in a certain radius of their business who have some similar interest to the product that this small business sells or whatever they may do. This gives small businesses the ability to advertise in a very powerful hyper-local context. Small business owners have noticed that when they do advertise on Facebook their business has doubled or tripled or even more.
So before everyone says how bad Facebook is that they sell everyones information to advertisers wait because they are actually benefiting many small business owners which is therefore supporting a large portion of society and all together benefiting this country because roughly 52% of America are employed by small business. So even though it is scary that we are individually targeted by advertisers because of Facebook I'm willing to give my information to support small local businesses and small business in general.
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