{"id":11218,"date":"2015-05-14T09:57:49","date_gmt":"2015-05-14T13:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=11218"},"modified":"2015-05-14T09:57:49","modified_gmt":"2015-05-14T13:57:49","slug":"verizon-aol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/14\/verizon-aol\/","title":{"rendered":"Verizon-AOL"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/stratechery.com\/2015\/verizon-aol-facebook-instant-articles-and-the-future-of-digital-advertising\/\">Ben Thompson<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/stratechery.com\/2015\/verizon-aol-facebook-instant-articles-and-the-future-of-digital-advertising\/\">\n<p>Verizon, meanwhile, knows a lot about its users:<\/p>\n<ul><li>By virtue of being a paid service, Verizon knows users&rsquo; names, addresses, and even social security numbers (gotta run those credit checks!)<\/li>\n<li>Because they are a phone carrier, Verizon knows your location, something that is useful not just for serving ads but also for ascertaining whether or not they were effective (seeing a McDonald&rsquo;s ad and visiting the Golden Arches soon after is a powerful signal)<\/li>\n<li>Because they are the ISP for your mobile phone (and for many customers, their home as well), Verizon doesn&rsquo;t need a cookie or device identifier: they can set a &ldquo;super-cookie&rdquo; on their servers to track everything you do on the Internet, and that&rsquo;s exactly what they&rsquo;ve done<\/li><\/ul>\n<p>This is why the deal makes so much sense: AOL provides the technology to target individuals instead of content, and Verizon the ability to track those individuals &mdash; at least the over 100 million customers they already have &mdash; at arguably a deeper level than anyone else in digital advertising (for non-Verizon customers, AOL&rsquo;s ad platform is still useful, albeit not as targeted; rates would be commensurately lower). The talk of this mashup joining Facebook and Google to form a &ldquo;Big 3&rdquo; of digital advertising is not unrealistic.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/qz.com\/403266\/by-the-numbers-aol-then-and-now\/\">Jason Karaian<\/a> (via <a href=\"http:\/\/daringfireball.net\/linked\/2015\/05\/13\/aol\">John Gruber<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/qz.com\/403266\/by-the-numbers-aol-then-and-now\/\"><p>With its stock inflated by dot-com mania, AOL was worth $224 billion in today&rsquo;s money back in 2000, just before it launched an audacious, expensive, and ill-fated bid to combine with Time Warner.<\/p>\n<p>Nothing about AOL today is on the same scale as back then. In a neat bit of symmetry, the $4.4 billion price tag that Verizon is paying to buy the whole of AOL today is the exact same amount as the company&rsquo;s dial-up subscription revenue in the year 2000.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ben Thompson: Verizon, meanwhile, knows a lot about its users: By virtue of being a paid service, Verizon knows users&rsquo; names, addresses, and even social security numbers (gotta run those credit checks!) Because they are a phone carrier, Verizon knows your location, something that is useful not just for serving ads but also for ascertaining [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1192,101,295,86],"class_list":["post-11218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-aol","tag-business","tag-history","tag-verizon"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11218"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11219,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11218\/revisions\/11219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}