Nothing Is Really Free

Most websites and apps that don't charge you money still cost something — usually your attention, your data, or both. Here's how that actually works, including for a site like this one.

Running a website costs real money — servers, development time, content. If you're not paying for the product with money, the business still needs revenue from somewhere to cover those costs and, usually, to make a profit. The two dominant models for covering that gap without a subscription fee are advertising and data collection, and in practice they're usually intertwined.

Advertising pays more per viewer when it's better targeted — an advert for hiking boots shown to someone who has recently searched for hiking gear is worth more to the advertiser than the same advert shown at random. That creates a direct commercial incentive to collect information about what you look at, click on, and spend time with, in order to build a more valuable advertising profile. This is often called the attention economy: your attention, and the data generated by how you spend it, is the actual product being sold, and the advertiser — not you — is the paying customer.

This isn't inherently sinister — it's simply how a huge share of the free internet is funded, from search engines to social media to most news sites. But it does mean the incentives of a free product aren't always perfectly aligned with the person using it: a service funded by attention has some commercial reason to want to maximise the time you spend on it, which isn't automatically the same thing as maximising how useful or informative that time actually is.