Intersection seems to be loosing money on their LINK NYC project by failing to meet projected ad revenue targets and essentially having to pay the city to operate a public infrastructure. This yearly loss doesn't even account the initial installation cost of development and hardware. It would seem like this business deal was a bad idea. And yet, Intersection continues to rapidly expand into other markets like London, Newark, and Philadelphia. What this article fails to mention is LINK NYC was never about the ad revenue but rather the data collection and Google's long term interest in harvesting the digital exhaust produced by cities. New York and most other cities aren't foolish enough to go all Quayside and render Google ground up control, so Intersection is going at it piecemeal. If the LINK NYC towers loose a few million on advertising, that is a small price to pay for the access to NYC's streets and the behavioral data that can be collected at scale with such a massive public infrastructure deployment. And dont think that traditional advertising is the only revenue source. The sale and use of behavioral data is incredibly lucrative and probably the main source of projected income as traditional forms of consumer manipulation give way to softer forms of quiet influence that leave us wanting without a clue where the wanting came from.
VIA: Gotham Gazette
