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[ox-en] Commercial peer production sites and exchange value



Hi list!

During the P2P workshop phenomenons like YouTube, MySpace and FaceBook
were often a topic. One of the questions that was raised was where
exactly the exchange value comes from which makes this sites
commercially interesting. Indeed an interesting question.

My answer so far is the following: These sites are commercially
interesting because they can be used to sell ads to commercial
customers - at least in the long run. So the question splits up into
two questions:

1. Where does the exchange value come from for ads?

2. Why are these sites interesting for placing ads?

The first question is not related to peer production phenomenons but
is a general question for the advertisement industry. I'm quite sure
there is an explanation based on labor theory of value though it is
probably somewhat complicated.

To me the second question seems to be more interesting. The problems
with ads is that they are (for most people) a pain in the
as^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmajor nuisance. So they need to be presented
together with some content which people are really interested in. A
site interesting for ads thus must be interesting for people.

Seeing it this way it is really good news for these peer production
sites because it proves that people are so interested in the use value
of these sites that they stand the pain of ads. In a way a nice
quality measure for peer production sites :-) .

In addition these sites may be able to collect data about their users
- for instance by logging their click behavior and from this create
interest profiles. Such profiles can be used for more exact targeting
of ads which makes it possible to sell ads at a higher price.

This reason is probably bad news for the peer production because such
data gathering is certainly alienated from the users. On the other
hands as long as this data is used only to show more specific ads it
is not worse than the ads in the first place. I mean nobody is forced
to click on an ad (well, some ads are designed in a way that it is
technically hard to not click them...).


						Grüße

						Stefan

_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de



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