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QUICKSAND

                                                December 24, 2016
                                                October  05, 2022


Charles Stross on web advertising:
  http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/12/eleven-tweets.html

        "Trying to build a business
        on ad revenue is like
        building on quicksand."

    Stross argues that there's a race-to-the-bottom
    as media gets increasingly desperate to gather
    eyeballs, that the internet is broken as
    information infrastructure because of this.

    He would like to see some sort of micropayment
    system, funded by ISPs.

        "So here's my question ...
        _what is to be done_?"



   stross@10:

      "Simply this: who pays for the product?"

      "Remember, if you're not paying for the
      product, you are the product."


My response

(1)

I think you're biased on this one because you're a
professional author: much of the internet has always
featured the writing of unpaid amateurs.  There would be
something to be said for an internet run on something
like a Burning Man ethic where commerce is kept out of
your face.  You can do a lot without either ad support
*or* micropayments, using just volunteer labor plus
non-profit and/or government support (and perhaps
unfortunately, advertisements-in-disguise from the hired
shills, and nice bloggers like yourself who after-all are
arguably mostly here to promote some books).

In any case: it's entirely possible to imagine a
worlds-within-worlds solution to this, you can use the
web to implement something that lives on the web, but by
rules of it's own (arguably that's what facebook, reddit,
et al are).  You could put together a site based on a
subscriptions model with micropayments built-into the
foundations (and indeed, a few commenters have mentioned
such sites).

For that matter, what would happen if reddit suddenly
stopped posting links to sites using js-popup ads?  The
existing feeder sites might actually have the muscle to
save the advertisers from themselves.


(2)

Advertising supported media has always had severe
problems: advertising tends to undermine neutrality
(e.g. no one wants to talk about how many people are
killed by mobile phone addiction, because money) and
there's a clear arms race problem where the advertisers
continue to get more obnoxious and intrusive in the hopes
of getting any visibility at all.

In the case of internet ads, something I've pondered for
some time is who pays any attention to it at all?  I've
never clicked through (intentionally) on a single web
ad-- most (not quite all) of the people I know say the
same... there would appear to be an underclass of *very
stupid people* who respond positively to these things,
and without them I wouldn't have a google to play around
with.



Here's a question for y'all: in this world where
privacy is history and every company is engaged in
super-slick micro-marketed targeted advertising (or so
I've been told), how long will it take them to figure
out that a JS popup ad in my face not only doesn't
sell me on anything, it makes me reflexivly close the
the tab and move on to something else... there are too     Or perhaps they
many things in the world for me to read to want to         have figured this
waste my time figuring out how to dismiss another          out, and driving
non-standard js window (which wouldn't exist at all        off someone like
except that people hate web popups so much, they're        myself is acceptable
all blocked at the browser level if they can be).          collateral damage
                                                           as they continue
                                                           shooting at the
                                                           marks?

   "Here's the thing about ad blockers--"

They're a sign that *everyone hates you*.  What kind of
business model begins "first, make everyone hate us"?





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