The Renegade Reporters
Page 7
“Hey,” Dev said, messing her hair. “Hey, Ash. Did you two come here yourselves?”
“Yeah, right,” Maya said, pulling away and redoing her long braid.
“We took the bus with my babysitter,” Ash explained. “She’s with my sister and baby brother on that big grassy area.”
“The beach?” Dev said. “Cool.”
Ash looked around. She’d been on the Johns Hopkins campus a few times before, but she’d never been inside a dorm room. There were two of everything: two beds, two big dressers, two small dressers, and two desks. All of it was cluttered with clothes, used dishes, and half-eaten snacks. Half the walls—the ones on Dev’s roommate’s side—were covered from floor to ceiling with photos and concert posters. But the walls on Dev’s side were completely bare except for a small, printed-out class schedule near the desk.
“Is your roommate here?” Maya asked.
“No,” Dev said. “Why don’t you grab his chair. He won’t be back for a while.”
Ash began sliding the roommate’s chair out from under his desk, but she stopped when she found dirty socks and a pair of boxers on the seat. “Maya!” she whispered.
“Holy moly!” Maya said, covering her face. “Dev!”
“What? Oh.” He chuckled. “Just push that stuff off.”
But Ash didn’t want to touch anyone’s boxers. She looked around for something to protect her hand and found she didn’t really want to touch anything in the room.
“Here,” Dev said. He came over and tilted the chair so that the boxers slid to the floor. Then he turned the chair so it’d face his computer. Ash still didn’t want to sit there. But she’d seen reporters broadcast live from the middle of hurricanes, or war zones. Surely, she could put her khakis-covered butt on a dorm room chair.
“So,” Ash said once she’d sat down, “Maya said you could show us some of the behind-the-scenes stuff about your website?”
“Yeah, sure. Did you want to see SEO stuff? Analytics?”
Ash and Maya looked at each other, then back at Dev, blankly.
“Remember that day,” Maya said, “when you were showing me some of the information you had about who visited your site?”
Ash tried to think of what would be most helpful in terms of understanding what they might have seen at Van Ness Media. “We want to know what you know about the people who use your website.”
“Got it. Sure.” Dev sat down at his desk and pulled up a log-in page.
“Hang on,” Maya said. “Let me find the best angle to record this.”
Dev stopped typing and turned around. “What?”
“I’m going to record it,” Maya explained. “For background footage for your episode.”
Dev shook his head.
“But Maya said you wanted to be on our show,” Ash said. “You’ll be the first in our series about local business owners.”
“Sure, yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll talk about my business and whatever. It’ll be good publicity. But you can’t record any of this analytics stuff.”
“We might not even use it,” Maya explained. “I just want to record everything so Brielle has lots of options for visuals when she goes to edit.”
But Dev was insistent. “You can look at this stuff as my sister, but not as a reporter. The analytics can’t be part of the show, not even in the background. My customers might think I’m sharing their personal information, or selling it, or—”
“Dev—” Maya started, but Ash said, “Deal.”
Dev wanted to keep his data secret. The people at Van Ness Media wanted to keep their meeting secret. In both cases, it only made Ash more determined to know what it showed. And Dev seemed one argument away from backing out of the whole thing. “We’ll keep the analytics off the record,” the anchor promised.
Dev looked at his sister and waited. Finally, Maya sighed and handed the phone to Ash, who made a show of sticking it in the zippered compartment of her backpack.
“So,” Ash said, back to business. “What information do you have about your customers?”
“Short answer?” Dev said. “Everything.”
“Everything?” Maya repeated.
“Check it out.” Dev’s fingers flew on his keyboard, and the screen filled with maps, charts, and tables. “I’ll start with the big-picture stuff. See this number? That’s how many people visited DevsGuides.com in the past thirty days.”
“Four thousand?” Ash said. “That seems like a lot.”
“It’s pretty good,” Dev assured her. “And that’s unique visitors. Counting repeats—the number of times the site was visited overall—it’s over seven thousand. See?”
“Dev!” Maya said. “That’s really good!”
“Especially for September,” Dev told her. “You should see my stats in May, around final exam time.”
“What was it when you first started?” Maya asked. “Like, in the very, very beginning?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Ten, twenty visits a month? And mostly people from Baltimore. But now it’s visitors from all over the country, even some from other countries.” He pointed to a map on the screen. Numbers popped up as he ran the cursor over it. “This map shows where the visitors live, or where they were when they were looking at my site, at least. And if I click on a state”—he clicked on Florida, to demonstrate—“it will get more specific, showing me which town or city they’re in.”
“Can you zoom in really close?” Ash asked, thinking of the map she’d seen at Van Ness Media. “Like, could you look at the specific streets in Federal Hill and see people moving around?”
“I can only get it down to ZIP codes,” Dev said, “but I’m sure other companies can get more specific.”
Maya and Ash exchanged meaningful glances, but Dev didn’t notice. He was pointing to the screen. “See, this circle means there were two hundred seventy visitors from Miami. If I click on it, I learn more about those visitors.” He kept clicking as he talked, pulling up page after page of information. “I can see their age and gender.” Click. “Their interests.” Click. “How they got to my site—if they clicked on a link, for instance, or did a search.” Click. “If they searched, I can see what they searched for.” Click. “And then, once they got here, I can see which pages they went to, in which order. If they ended up buying a study guide, which one they bought.”
“I told you it was a ton of data,” Maya said to Ash. “He used to stare at it for hours a day.”
“Yeah, man,” Dev said. “How do you think I went from twenty visitors a month to four thousand?”
“By using this data?” Ash tried.
“Bingo!” Dev sat back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “My study guides are good, sure. But a lot of it’s because of this data. Check this out.” He pointed at Ash, and then went back to the computer. “If we go to my sales stats page, I can see which guides sold the most in a given period of time. Let’s look at last week.” He did. “Okay, cellular biology. The purpose of cells, parts of cells, that sort of stuff. Makes sense, right? Because it’s the beginning of the year, and biology classes are starting with cells.”
“Oh,” Ash said, “right.” She didn’t know anything about biology classes, but she wanted to see where this went.
“Now. Let’s look at all the people who downloaded my cellular biology guide, and see where they live. Lots of them live in . . . New York. So, knowing that, I can look up the standard biology curriculum in New York, and see what the next unit is going to be. Or I can just look at my past sales and see which guide most people download about a month after they download the cellular biology one, especially people who live in New York. Let’s say they usually buy my study guide for genetics next. In that case, I can wait a couple weeks and send an email to those people with a direct link to the genetics guide. Or I can run some targeted advertising on Google or Facebook.”
<
br /> “Targeted advertising?” Ash asked, trying to keep up.
“Ads that will only appear to certain people,” Dev explained. “In this case, I could set an ad for my genetics study guide to appear on Google or Facebook specifically to people who are in ninth grade somewhere in New York. Maybe even people in ninth grade, in New York, who previously searched for things related to cellular biology.”
“Like the ads for sunglasses all over our computer,” Maya said, “because Mom and Massi were looking for new ones. That’s called targeted advertising?”
“Bingo,” Dev said.
Ash had a story of her own about that. “Last year,” she said, “when it was close to my birthday, I used the computer after my dad, and there were ads for girls’ boots on the side of every webpage I went to. He must have been looking at boots to get me for my birthday.”
“You did get boots!” Maya said. “Your really cool gray ones.”
“Yep.” Ash lifted her feet. She was wearing them right now. “Get this. Once I realized what my dad was doing, I did some searching of my own and found the exact ones I wanted. Then I made sure to visit the page with them a few times. So the next time Dad used the computer, these exact ones would appear in all the ads.”
Maya looked shocked, but Dev nodded, clearly impressed. “I like it,” he said. “Way to use targeted advertising to your advantage.”
“I don’t know,” Maya said uneasily. “It’s like people are spying on us.”
“Like Harry in the hallway,” Ash put in.
“Worse than that, because we don’t even know who’s doing it or when. The whole thing’s just sort of . . . creepy.”
“Oh, it’s super creepy,” Dev agreed. “Big companies are tracking everything we do, all the time.”
Van Ness Media is a big company, Ash thought. Are they keeping track of more than just locations? “Everything?” she repeated.
“Yeah, man. Your computer has a unique IP address. So does your phone. It’s kind of like a fingerprint, and it leaves a trail wherever you go online. That’s actually what it’s called when companies track this stuff—fingerprinting. They keep track of your searches and your posts and your purchases. Then every website has code built into it to collect and analyze that information. Like mine does. Plus, we all give tons of other information voluntarily, when we sign up for things or comment on things or post things. I know some stuff about my customers, but I’m just barely scratching the surface. If I wanted, I could buy more data. There are companies called data brokers that collect all our personal information and sell it to other companies.”
“But,” Maya asked, “why?”
“Because people want it,” Dev said with a shrug. “The more they know about you, the more stuff they can try to sell you.”
Ash shifted uncomfortably in her gray boots, thinking through what the shoe company knew about her. They knew where she lived (since her dad had to put in an address to have them shipped) and how big her feet were (from what size he ordered) and what color and style she liked (from the ones she’d picked). Then she remembered, suddenly but clearly, that one of the websites she’d looked at for boots had been advertising a sale on “pre-teen necessities,” and Ash had clicked on a few training bras, just to see what they looked like. Did the company track that? She imagined a meeting like the one at Van Ness Media, only this time it was her personal browsing history on the big screen, and the woman in the suit was saying, “Ashley Simon-Hockheimer spent five minutes considering a white training bra, size small.” Talk about mortifying.
“Do these companies keep track of what individual people do?” she asked, trying to sound casual. “Like, do they know that I, Ashley Simon-Hockheimer, looked up . . . something in particular? Or do they just know it was a girl about my age in Baltimore?”
“Depends. I know the name of anyone who buys one of my guides. Companies usually say the data they track is anonymous, but who knows? They probably keep really detailed profiles on everyone, with names and everything.”
Ash swallowed. She’d heard that word before, profile. That’s what had been on the screen at Van Ness Media during the secret meeting. Profile ID. The presenter had said each user had a unique profile ID. The location data must have been just one part of each person’s profile. Brielle’s theory—that they were creating a navigation app—was looking less and less likely. It seemed like all this profile stuff had to do with advertising.
But Van Ness Media didn’t have any advertising in their programs. Maria Van Ness had said so in that interview. Ash remembered it clearly: We aim to make money by selling software, not our users’ attention spans. If that was true, why would they be making profiles for all their users? Ash thought of Beckett’s word during his bath: Fishy. There was a news story here for sure.
“Why do you guys want to know all this stuff, anyway?” Dev asked.
“Um,” said Maya.
“Background research for a story,” Ash finished.
“Not the story about Dev’s Guides,” Dev reminded them.
“We know, Dev,” Maya said. “Holy moly. We already promised.”
Ash’s phone vibrated, and she took it out to find a message from Olive, asking how much longer they’d be. “Can we do the Dev’s Guides story now?” she asked. “My babysitter’s waiting for us.”
“And the smell in here is starting to get to me,” Maya added, wrinkling her nose.
“Yeah, what is that?” Dev asked. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but it didn’t smell until you two arrived.”
“Yeah, right,” Maya said. “Ash and I smell fine. It’s your dirty clothes.”
“You mean these?” Dev pulled a rumpled T-shirt off the floor and held it to Maya’s nose. She shrieked and pushed him away.
“Or is it my roommate’s socks?” Dev asked. He got up to reach for them, and this time both girls shrieked.
“Ew, I think it might really be his socks,” Dev said, pulling his hand away. “Let’s keep the smell off the record too, okay?”
But the news anchor smiled and shrugged. “No promises. We’ve got to report the facts.”
THE UNDERGROUND NEWS, EPISODE 3
REPORTER: Ashley Simon-Hockheimer
VIDEOGRAPHER: Maya Joshi-Zachariah
EDITOR: Brielle Diamond
SLUG: Dev’s Guides (Local business 1)
VIDEO
Anchor on Camera
AUDIO
ANC: Coming up, an exclusive interview with Dev Joshi-Zachariah, the founder and CEO of the hugely popular Dev’s Study Guides. I’m Ashley Simon-Hockheimer with the Renegade Reporters, and you’re watching The Underground News.
VIDEO
Intro and Credits
AUDIO
NONE
VIDEO
Anchor on Camera
AUDIO
ANC: Welcome to The Underground News. Today we’re kicking off a new series about local businesses and successful entrepreneurs. Our first interview is with Dev Joshi-Zachariah of DevsGuides.com, which offers downloadable study guides for middle and high schoolers.
VIDEO
Images of DevsGuides.com
AUDIO
ANC voiceover: DevsGuides.com started just two years ago with the sale of one study guide. It now has study guides for more than fifty topics in every major subject of middle and high school, with more coming all the time.
VIDEO
Dev and Anchor Walking on Johns Hopkins Campus
AUDIO
ANC voiceover: The founder and creator of all the guides is Dev Joshi-Zachariah, a freshman at Johns Hopkins University. Disclosure: He also happens to be the brother of The Underground News video-grapher, Maya Joshi-Zachariah, which is how we managed to get this exclusive interview. DevsGuides.com is based in Baltimore. In fact, the founder and CEO runs it entirely
from his Johns Hopkins dorm room.
VIDEO
Anchor and Dev in his Room
AUDIO
ANC: What gave you the idea to start DevsGuides.com?
DEV: Starting in middle school, whenever I had a test coming, I’d sum up all my notes in one or two pages, to help myself study. Sometimes my friends would ask to borrow my review sheets, and they always said they were really helpful for the tests. Then, in high school, I started tutoring, and I’d share my study guides with the kids I tutored. Word started to spread, and suddenly, people were asking if they could buy the guides. I sold my first study guide to one family for ten bucks. The business just started growing from there.
VIDEO
Images of DevsGuides.com
AUDIO
ANC voiceover: And boy did it grow. The website now has more than four thousand unique visitors a month. Around midterm and final exams, that number can be as high as nine thousand. According to the Baltimore Business Journal, Dev’s Guides is one of the fastest growing companies in Maryland. And Baltimore Magazine recently featured Dev in an article about up-and-coming entrepreneurs in Maryland.
VIDEO
Anchor and Dev in his Room
AUDIO
ANC: Your company has grown really quickly. How many people work for DevsGuides.com?
DEV: Just one. Me.
ANC: You don’t have any employees?
DEV: Sometimes I’ll pay a friend to look over a new guide for spelling and stuff before I post it. But otherwise, I do everything. I make the guides, I run the website, I do the marketing and advertising, I deal with customer service questions. I do it all.
ANC: And you do it all from this room?
DEV: I have a roommate, so I do it all from my half of this room.
VIDEO
Sidney Hendelman at his Home
AUDIO
ANC voiceover: Sidney Hendelman is a high school sophomore, and he’s one of DevsGuides most loyal customers.