• DOI:10.7551/mitpress/11304.003.0011
• Corpus ID: 211480355

Online Advertising as a Shaper of Public Communication

@article{Bermejo2019OnlineAA,
  title={Online Advertising as a Shaper of Public Communication},
  author={Fernando Bermejo},
  journal={Human Rights in the Age of Platforms},
  year={2019}
}

• Fernando Bermejo
• Published 2019
• Economics
• Human Rights in the Age of Platforms

The privatization of the Internet in the mid1990s opened the door to its commercialization (Greenstein 2000, 2015). A technological infrastructure that had for decades been financed and controlled by different government agencies was immediately, and almost completely, shaken by business interests (Abbate 1999). As a result, and two decades later, a handful of companies have emerged as central actors of the online public sphere. With the advent of the social web, the arena in which individuals communicate and discuss collective issues and problems is to a large extent supported by digital platforms controlled by corporations. Their practices, policies, and technologies play a fundamental role in shaping private communications and public discourse and affect the exercise and level of protection of a range of human rights, as illustrated throughout this volume. In order to understand these “new media” companies and how they shape communication and affect human rights, it is necessary to pay attention to their business logic, to the ways in which they generate revenue and maximize profits. This chapter attempts to do that, first, by linking the idea of revenue model to that of control over the communication process and by showing how these revenue models have evolved over the history of public communication. It presents a brief overview of the evolutionary line that goes from models in which control is purely physical to those in which it is informational and in which advertising is central. It then proceeds to examine the transformation of the advertising model as the main source of revenue for online communication platforms. The