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Websites - Referat
Most people use websites like Facebook , Whatsapp, Wikipedia and Instagram. These websites are for free but you cannot avoid advertising. If they were chargeable there could be fewer people who would use them. The people would maybe search for websites or messengers which are for free and they wouldn't use the chargeable websites any longer. Most of the social networking sites are for free and when you search the reason for that on the internet you won't find anything apart from one reason. This one reason is that the owners of Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook wanted to get more users, that’s why they abolished the fees. As it will be described in the individual websites, most aren't for free but you don't notice it. You pay for these websites without knowing it. Everything you put on the Internet via your smartphone about yourself and about your life is like paying. The internet takes personal data like the shops money. They sell your data to companies, which are interested in them because they can send you adverts for products they think you are interested in. Data have become very valuable and that is why companies are prepared to pay a huge amount of money for getting as much information as possible about potential customers. The only thing you have to pay for if you want to use these websites, is your internet connection. If you want to use them on your smartphone you need a wireless connection.
The owner of Facebook and Whatsapp is Mark Zuckerberg and he is among the richest people in the world. He studied informatics and psychology but at the age of 19 he dropped out of univesity, as he wanted to found a social networking site for people to communicate with others. In 2004 he founded the social networking site Facebook. His fortune is about 74 billion dollars. In 2007 Zuckerberg wanted the companies to develop games for social networking sites. Nobody controlled these games and because of that the developer have had access to all the data of the users. Now there is a data theft scandal as the company Cambridge Analytica used the data of Facebook users and their friends for adverts for the presidential election in the USA. They wanted to influence the users to elect Donald Trump. The policy consulting firm is said to have abused the data of 50 million Facebook users. The US consumer protection agency FTC will therefore launch an investigation against Facebook.
Facebook enables the users to create private profiles to show themselves. If companies want to show their products on Facebook they will have to pay for it. For example they want the users to post photos with their products. This way the Facebook owners can earn money. The companies which show their products on Facebook pay either according to the quantity of clicks or the number of the users who see the ads. Advertising is the most important source of income for Facebook. At the beginning it was only on the edge, now it is between the messages. There are a lot of games and apps on Facebook. If you want to use them you will have to pay for them. There are also games for free but when you want to buy something in these games, the owners earn money. The Facebook owners have a new idea for Facebook. They want to enable to the users to write to celebrities and that won’t be for free. A second idea of Facebook for earning money is to provide other services for which users have to pay. For example, the users would have free access to up to 10 news articles. If they want to retrieve more news articles they will have to pay for them.
Whatsapp is a messenger with which the users can send photos, messages, videos and audio files to their friends and family. The enterprise Whatsapp inc. was founded by Jan Koum and Brian Acton in California in 2009.
In 2014 Facebook paid 19 billion dollars for Whatsapp. When Whatsapp was bought by Facebook, Facebook wanted to transfer the phone numbers and information from Whatsapp to Facebook. Johannes Caspar forbade this transfer, Facebook was against this ban but it lost the lawsuit. At the beginning of Whatsapp the users had to pay 1 dollar every year. The Iphone users only had to pay 1 dollar once. Now Whatsapp is for free, has no games and no advertising. The owners want to turn Whatsapp into a major source of income. According to rumors, there will soon be a test phase for chargeable functions of the messenger in India. However, there aren't any official statements. There are other rumors that there will soon be advertising on Whatsapp. They want to enable the companies to provide business profiles. This offer wouldn’t be for free and that means the owners could earn money with Whatsapp but the plans for this project have existed for a long time and they haven’t been implemented yet. The owners don’t have any concept yet with which they can earn money. However, they want to solve this problem as soon as possible. Thanks to Facebook, Whatsapp won’t become broke. Whatsapp is the biggest social networking site worldwide. The enterprise searches for product managers who will market Whatsapp and make it profitable. Owning two of the major networking sites means a lot of power for the owners of Facebook.
Instagram
When Instagram was launched, the owners got money from investors. At first it was very important for the owners to create a big user's base. Now, Instagram earns money with advertising, which you can see between the posts or in the post, when a user advertises a company. Instagram is a very popular social networking site with which you can follow every celebrity person and ordinary persons. You can post videos and photos and you can watch your favorite persons on their live videos. When they are live, you see them in a video which they are filming at the same moment and you can write comments which they can respond to. You can say, Instagram earns money in the same way as Facebook. They sell your data to companies. It is not known how much money the Instagram owners earn.
When you want to get information about something you mostly search it on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free website with much information about all kinds of issues and it is the most comprehensive dictionary in the world. As Wikipedia is for free, like Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook, the owners have to earn money in another way and that they will have to do that as fast as possible because Wikipedia has financial problems. The founder of Wikipedia wants the website to be free of charge. Therefore they rely on donations from the users. Every year around Christmas they ask their users for donations of around 7 million dollars in total. The money is needed to run the website. Usually after some weeks they can raise enough money to keep the website free from advertising. The founder of Wikipedia does not make a fortune with the website he operates. At the moment Wikipedia costs 75.000 dollar per month. These are mainly operation costs for the 350 servers and the salaries for the 10 employees. As there will be more and more users the costs will increase dramatically.
In conclusion you can say that there are websites which are really for free like Wikipedia. The only problem of this website is that you sometimes need to be careful with the information which is provided.
Other websites, especially social networking sites are not really for free. It is up to you to decide if you really want to finance them by revealing information about yourself. Even if you do not think that what you give away about yourself is important, companies are obviously ready to spend a lot of money on getting hold of these seemingly “unimportant” information.
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