jueves, 24 de marzo de 2011

Facebook, a gold mine of information

Self-study activity:
Watch this short YouTube video on Facebook, which explains the way Facebook makes their money, and complete the gaps in the transcript below.



Today, even with the most (1) … systems that exist, they only have estimates of what someone’s (2) … might be or what someone’s (3) … might be or what they might be interested in. But on Facebook we know exactly what someone’s (2) … exactly is. And exactly how old they area, and exactly what they are interested in.

At a presentation to advertisers in 2007 Mark Zuckerberg pitched the benefits of Facebook’s vast database.

When you run ads on Facebook, you’re also gonna learn a lot about the (4) … that you’re reaching. And a lot of this you’re gonna be able to do directly to the (5) … that you send to them and the content that they upload. But the rest we’re gonna do by aggregating non-personal (6) … information about the users that you’re reaching.

Facebook’s lifeblood and the (7) … of its revenue model is the accumulation of data its users volunteer , including their interests or likes. Advertisers, who helped boost Facebook’s revenue to an estimated (8) … billion dollars in 2010, buy access to that gold mine of anonymous demographic information, (9) … them to reach a remarkably specific and well (10) … .

Key:
1. advertising 2. gender 3. age 4. audience 5. messages 6. identifiable 7. heart 8. 1.4 9. enabling 10. targeted