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Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse.
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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A quick check online says that Samsung--which has about 25% of the global market--sold at least 1M OLED televisions and 8.3M QLED televisions in 2023. So, let's say that they sell 9.5M televisions annually (I'm not sure if the numbers are global or US-only); that's $190M in pure profit from advertising alone. For a billion-dollar plus corporation, that might seem small, but it's certainly enough to get them to take notice.
This should add to their profits.
Experian, the ~~social credit score~~ credit rating company? Fuuuuuck
Experian has a program where you connect your bank account and they monitor transactions for things that could improve your credit by a couple points. I'm sure they're not also harvesting the rest of your data to use in their analytics, right?
My jaw dropped when I saw that. Not sure how many people are aware if it.
That deserves to be its own headline. Something like "consumer electronics companies now conspiring with credit rating companies to surveil the public even more invasively."
It's even better for them: those $190M are per-year for the lifetime of that TV.
So if for simplification we said they also sold 9.5M TVs in 2021 and again in 2022, in the year of 2024 the will be making $570M from the TVs they sold in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
If Samsung TVs are used in average for 10 years, in 2033 they will still be making money from TVs sold in 2024 and all the years in between. If their rate of sales remains 9.5M per year and how much they generate per quarter in data and advertising revenue from those TVs remains $5 (true, all big simplifications), by 2033 they will be making $1.90 BILLIONS from just this in addition to what they make from selling TVs.
No wonder they're full in on this monetization of users even whilst making user experience significantly worse - they would need to lose a huge number of sales due to this for it to not be worth it for them.
That's just 1 year's sales. If the TV lasts 5 years it's raking in 5 times the data. 190M x 5 = 950M/year, and 5 seems conservative.
Good point.