[wamatt]

>"If you're not paying money, you're the product being sold" is one of those cached phrases that looks insightful on first glance, but contains no actual substance.

And that summary judgement follows a familiar pattern: 'This is meant to be insightful, but actually... let me show how the prevailing wisdom is wrong, with my new improved analysis'

The problem here, is that you're trying to be too clever in order to stretch words beyond their common usage.

Some personal perspective: Myself and the rest of the EA (Enterprise Architecture) team at my prior company spent almost a month painfully debating the meaning of word "Customer". Yes, I know, crazy and yet we had good reason for the corporate dictionary to be accurate. Financial control systems and exec reporting relied on it. But I digress, and while I can't remember the exact definition we used, the essential fact is:

A customer pays for goods or services.

It doesn't matter if they use dollars, bitcoins, or bushels of corn. Nearly all users of Google are NOT customers, and indeed do form part of the product offering, as the OP stated.

Additional references:

"A customer (also known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product, or idea, obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier for a monetary or other valuable consideration. [1][2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer

[2] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/customer

[jmillikin]

In that definition, the surrender of part of the browser window to advertisement is the "valuable consideration". It's only worth tiny fractions of a cent, sure, but heap those fractions up high enough and it becomes worthwhile.

For your position (that ad-supported implies searcher is not the customer) to be correct, there would have to be some minimum amount of cost involved before a human can become a customer. Say the search engine charges one dollar per query. The searcher must be the customer, obviously. What if the search engine charges one a penny per query? Is the searcher still the customer? What about one thousandth? One millionth?

At what point does the searcher's expenditure fall so low that you consider them to be a product, rather than a human?

---

Aside:

Apart from my day job, I write a lot of software. Some of it is made available for use for no monetary charge, and supported by ads. I do not consider the humans who use my software to be "products", nor the advertisement networks to be "customers". To say that someone is a product just because they don't want to pay money for something strikes me as borderline sociopathic.

[wamatt]

"To say that someone is a product just because they don't want to pay money for something strikes me as borderline sociopathic."

Subjective feelings, while perfectly reasonable and acceptable in their own right, should maintain little bearing on the objective and consensually derived definitions of words, if one is being intellectually honest.

Simply put, it would be a stretch to convince us that your distaste for the concept (calling it 'borderline sociopathic') is not influencing your POV.

[dragonwriter]

> A customer pays for goods or services.

True

> It doesn't matter if they use dollars, bitcoins, or bushels of corn.

Or, say, personal information that can be used in targeting advertising.

> Nearly all users of Google are NOT customers

I'd describe them a suppliers, but unless you've suddenly decided that, contrary your early statement, it does matter what they provide in exchange for the services they receive, they can also, by your logic, be described accurately as "customers".

> and indeed do form part of the product offering, as the OP stated

No, the users do not form part of the product offering; the slave trade is not part of Google's business models.

They are suppliers of inputs (both information used in targeting advertising, and the advertising opportunities through which the actual advertising is delivered being the key pair of inputs) that are used in Google's product offerings; insofar as these inputs are exchanged for services Google provides rather than for cash payment, they are also customers purchasing those services in a non-cash exchange.

[wamatt]

"Or, say, personal information that can be used in targeting advertising."

This time, it's the word 'pay' that is being shoehorned.

Let's assume I run a survey company, and I invite a bunch of people over for a BBQ. During lunch I passively monitor their interactions and sell that data. Did the guests pay for the BBQ?

">I'd describe them a suppliers,"

That is a bit more specific and possibly more accurate, but at least 67% less sexy ;).

However it does not invalidate the original product claim. Often suppliers are part of that chain. They supply raw goods (personal data in this case) that gets packaged as part of a product offering (aka adwords) or service, and then sold to the customer.

[jmillikin]

  > Let's assume I run a survey company, and I invite a
  > bunch of people over for a BBQ. I then monitor their
  > interactions and sell that data. Did the guest pay for
  > the BBQ?

If you told them ahead of time that you would do this, then yes, they paid for the food by giving you some information about who they like to talk to at lunch. They would be customers.

If you did not tell them, then you spied on them without consent, and they would be victims.