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On this view, you could argue that a dairy cow is a farmer's customer. The cow gets food and pays for it with milk. Or a fish is a fisherman's customer: the fish gets food, and pays for it with some pain and inconvenience (in the case of catch-and-release) or with its life.

It is useful to distinguish transactions that involve money from transactions that don't, and to restrict the word "customer" to apply only to those situations where money is exchanged, if for no other reason than that only in situations where money is exchanged is it clear who is the customer: it's the person who pays.

Google's advertisers are its customers. The (attention of the) people doing the searches are the product. Search results are the means by which the product is procured, not unlike the bait on the fisherman's hook.

The difference is consent, not the medium of exchange. A fish can't consent to be part of the dinner-diner relationship.

A doctor and an armed mugger are different because even though in both cases they are given money in exchange for life, the doctor's patient[1] consented to do so.

Also, restricting customers to people who pay with money excludes transactions based on bartering or favors. If I design a nice website for someone and they give me a bottle of wine, that's still a customer relationship even though no money has changed hands.

[1] Or their guardian, legal representative, etc.

Exchange of money is a necessary but not sufficient condition to have a customer relationship.

As for voluntariness, it is arguable that the fish enters into the transaction voluntarily, if perhaps not fully informed. But here's a better example: my cat provides certain intangible benefits to me in exchange for food. I can assure you that my cat is entering into this exchange voluntarily. Who is the customer?

Still not satisfied? Fine. Two kids collect baseball cards. They agree to trade a Hank Aaron for a Babe Ruth. Who is the customer?

Unlike a barter relationship, a customer-provider relationship is necessarily asymmetric. The only way to reliably identify which way the asymmetry runs is to follow the money.

  > As for voluntariness, it is arguable that the fish
  > enters into the transaction voluntarily, if perhaps not
  > fully informed.
  > [...]
  > my cat provides certain intangible benefits to me in
  > exchange for food. I can assure you that my cat is
  > entering into this exchange voluntarily. Who is the
  > customer?

A fish or cat or any animal, cannot consent to anything due to lack of intelligence. Consent is only meaningful when all parties have roughly equal information about what's involved in the relationship, the consequences, and the alternatives.

  > Fine. Two kids collect baseball cards. They agree to
  > trade a Hank Aaron for a Babe Ruth. Who is the customer?

If only one kid knows that one card is much more valuable than the other, then it's not a customer relationship, it's a scam.

If both (or neither) know the value of the cards, and there's no coercion, then the customer is whoever initiated the trade. They understood what was involved just as well as the other kid, and made the informed decision that they wanted to exchange the cards.

  > Unlike a barter relationship, a customer-provider
  > relationship is necessarily asymmetric. The only way
  > to reliably identify which way the asymmetry runs is
  > to follow the money.

I don't buy into this idea that a customer relationship is inherently imbalanced. In fact, the ideal of such a relationship assumes perfect balance -- two people with things worthless to themselves, but valuable to the other.

>For most customers, the product is search results, and their payment is to let part of their screen be occupied by ads.

Would you say adblockers are theft?

Is every consenting value exchange a customer-provider relationship?

>the ideal of such a relationship assumes perfect balance -- two people with things worthless to themselves, but valuable to the other.

Not worthless, just worth less. If I buy a product/service, I felt my money had less worth than what I was buying and the provider held the opposite stance.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about this.

"A fish or cat or any animal, cannot consent to anything due to lack of intelligence."

Now come over to my house and try to pet my cat without her consent...

Not really on-topic in any way but I just dislike people who disrespect animals.

>If I design a nice website for someone and they give me a bottle of wine, that's still a customer relationship even though no money has changed hands.

But who is the customer?

>"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

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.

"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.

> 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.

"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.

  > 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.

I actually find it very insightful, even if it has been repeated a number of times. And repetition hasn't eroded its truth.

At the end of the day, real estate on a screen is means to an end, not the ultimate end itself. The ultimate end is of course money, which is paid by advertisers. The means to an end is more properly viewed as a factor of Google's production than an end itself.

I would distinguish linguistically by saying that I am a user of google's products, but not a customer. A customer pays.

We are the products because we are being sold by Google to advertisers.

Google doesn't sell people to advertisers. For one thing, that would be illegal. For another, they don't have a delivery infrastructure that would support it. And, finally, advertisers aren't interested in buying people, they are interested in buying advertising impressions (particularly, ones that are targeted so as to be more likely to produce sales.)

What Google does is use information it receives from users to sell targeted advertising impressions in services that the users use. The users are suppliers -- both of the information and the advertising opportunities -- rather than either "customers" or "products".

> cached phrases

I think you mean "catchphrases."

No, I specifically mean "cached phrases": http://lesswrong.com/lw/749/cached_phrases/

The fact that someone has a web page devoted to this particular eggcorn doesn't change the fact that it is an eggcorn: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4566

The fact that "cached phrase" has a similar pronunciation to "catchphrase" does not mean that they are related. In particular, this is not an instance of an eggcorn because substituting one for the other will result in a sentence that does not make sense. The quotes in the page you link to are instances of malapropism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism ).