You.com’s big differentiating feature is that it lets people influence which sources they see. You can “upvote” and “downvote” specific categories, so when you run searches, you’ll see preferred sources first, neutral searches next, and downvoted sources last.

But these lookalike audiences aren’t just potential new customers — they can also be used to exclude unwanted customers in the future, creating a sort of ad targeting demographic blacklist.

Without a retweet button, Wetherell said, brands “would certainly be less inclined to have a financial relationship with [a platform]. And when you're Twitter and that's vastly your primary source of income, that might be a challenge.”

Online media, despite being so different from traditional printed media, is still trying to maximize its potential audience, and in order to do that, going for quantity over quality.

we drove 10 billion clicks a month to publishers’ websites for free.

We’re now in the early stages of testing a “Propensity to Subscribe” signal based on machine learning models in DoubleClick to make it easier for publishers to recognize potential subscribers, and to present them the right offer at the right time.

SearchEngineLand notes that this could have an impact on the ad market, since a website’s visitors may be automatically scrolled down past its ads to the relevant content. The publication notes that sites may need to change the location of their ads in light of Google’s latest feature.

While many blogs get dozens or hundreds of visitors, Searls' site attracts thousands. "I partly don't want to care what the number is," he says. "I used to work in broadcasting, where everyone was obsessed by that. I don't want an audience. I feel I'm writing stuff that's part of a conversation. Conversations don't have audiences."

Our political conversations are happening on an infrastructure built for viral advertising, and we are only beginning to adapt.

Refusing advertising is refusing to privilege moneyed speech. The increasing equation of money with speech—that is, those with the most money can be the loudest and most persistent voices in contemporary media—is denied when advertising is refused.

Carol Nichols of the Twitter alternative rstat.us makes this explicit: Twitter is “actively ignoring the needs of their users in order to serve the needs of their advertisers and shareholders.” In contrast, she argues that rstat.us is more concerned with user expression.

Marketers would prefer to have their own predictive marketing platforms, helping them collect and activate their own proprietary data. Enterprise technology companies want that future as well. They want to be the ones to sell and provision those tech platforms, integrating and packaging them with all of the other systems they sell into the enterprise, from CRM to call center management to finance and sales force automation. Quite naturally, they worry that it will be easier for Google and Facebook to add their own CRM and related systems than it will be for them to replicate Google and Facebook’s digital marketing system.Agencies? They just want to keep themselves in the middle. Whether as consultants, media brokers, system integrators or owners of syndicated data, agencies just want to stay relevant and find ways to reverse their declining margins.