Data Merchants

May 10

“GDPR and the Lost Generation of Innovative Apps” was published this month in the National Bureau of Economic Research by Rebecca Janßen, Reinhold Kesler, Michael E. Kummer, and Joel Waldfogel. Here is the abstract:

Using data on 4.1 million apps at the Google Play Store from 2016 to 2019, we document that GDPR induced the exit of about a third of available apps; and in the quarters following implementation, entry of new apps fell by half. We estimate a structural model of demand and entry in the app market. Comparing long-run equilibria with and without GDPR, we find that GDPR reduces consumer surplus and aggregate app usage by about a third. Whatever the privacy benefits of GDPR, they come at substantial costs in foregone innovation.

“GDPR and the Lost Generation of Innovative Apps” — emphasis mine
Janßen, Kesler, Kummer, and Waldfogel

Please allow me to write this abstract in a different way:

…we find that GDPR has effectively removed about a third of apps that relied on ingesting and selling data as a value add to advertisers and has reduced junk app usage by the same amount. The privacy benefits of GDPR are valuable, and they have forced apps to substantially increase their value to consumers using innovation.

Me

Netflix Paints Its Picture With AI

May 3
Daybreak Premiered On Netflix On Oct. 24, 2019. "It was just god awful. And there's a ton of these shows."
Daybreak Premiered On Netflix On Oct. 24, 2019. “It was just god awful. And there’s a ton of these shows.”

From Ryan Broderick, podcaster at The Content Mines and author of the highly entertaining Garbage Day newsletter:

2019. The show Daybreak came out. It is horrible. It is what radicalized chuds on YouTube think of all Netflix shows. It’s, like, a perfomatively woke, algorithmically generated, teen-not-comedy thing about what it would be like to live in a high school that was in the post-apocalyptic, Mad Max kind of… thing. And it was just god awful. And there’s a ton of these shows. Where you’re like — you can just see the robot going, ‘This genre’s performing well and this genre’s performing well. Let’s combine them.’

Ryan Broderick
“The Facebookification of Netflix”
The Content Mines

Broderick paints a damning picture of how Netflix managed to become its own echo chamber. The machine learns what it’s programmed to do, the business green-lights the results. Soon, the system itself is flooded with an AI-generated list of shows that all seem to get canceled before a third season.

In related news, this is what artificial intelligence creates when I tell it to paint a picture of “a teenage student in high school surrounded by zombies”:

I asked AI to paint me a picture of “a teenage student in high school surrounded by zombies”

It’s a questionable result. When you give questionable art to consumers who have, sight unseen, already paid for it, the results seem to be speaking for themselves.