If you ask me, we should simply delete the entire advertisement sector—influencers included—and start from scratch. The amount of wasted resources (i.e. attention, money, electricity, bandwidth, time, smart people) is just insane! The benefits I see are mostly lot's of jobs and means for the biggest businesses to sell more stuff. That can hardly be worth it.
I know I'm dreaming and it will never happen, but still... let me dream.
Here's a plan: Tax it. Tax the everliving hell out of it.
The problem isn't the existence of advertising, it is that there is so much of the crap advertising. Taxing ads would raise the price of advertising, which would lower the ROI on advertising and force ad buyers to be more careful about which ads they buy. Crappy advertisers who are not actually connecting buyers with sellers would tend to go out of business, shrinking the industry. The remaining ad industry would have to create less ads with higher quality to compete in the newer high cost marketplace.
Basically, the idea is to move the supply curve on the (on the supply and demand curves) to a place where they meet at a higher price and a lower quantity. See for example, https://www.economicshelp.org/microessays/equilibrium/price-... (scroll down to Tax Incidence). Note that for advertising the 'producer' on this graph is the company making the ads and the 'consumer' is the company buying an ad for their product. The part about moving the curve to a lower quantity is the key! The goal here being to reduce the ratio of 'attention used' to 'product-consumer fit created'. We would have a smaller, better ad industry. We can't have that with current market conditions; competition won't allow it.
The nice thing about a tax plan is that it is pretty easy to sell people on the idea of 'take money away from these people who annoy all of us and give it to [insert social good here]' . The best people in advertising would likely benefit from it as well, as they would likely stay in business and have better margins in a smaller industry with less competition.
So, keep dreaming, but feel free to spread this idea around. Maybe it will grow by word-of-mouth.
> If you ask me, we should simply delete the entire advertisement sector—influencers included—and start from scratch. The amount of wasted resources (i.e. attention, money, electricity, bandwidth, time, smart people) is just insane!
I agree there is lots of wasted time out there. But the advertising paid for Google, Facebook etc. It pays for Chrome, Android, React, PyTorch etc.
I'm just amazed ads work at all. Anytime I receive an ad I didn't explicitly request, I boycott that company. I'd have hoped enough likeminded people in the world would naturally defeat the ad sector, but evidently I'm an outlier. I'll never understand why the average consumer rewards and reinforces ad spend
I do something similar. I block every account that shows me ads on Twitter and Instagram. I wouldn't say I boycott them but 99% are companies I wouldn't buy anything from in the first place.
Same, I don't recall a single time an ad made me want to buy something, if anything I think "if they have to shove this in front of my eyes and I don't already know the product it probably is bad or useless to me"
Major websites are ad-funded, the internet isn't. Networking technology, IPV4/6, http, ssl and most website frameworks aren't funded by advertising ( and even if they are eg react, they won't disappear.)
Let FAANGs fail. Let them try to disguise ads into content, fail and go off the deep end. What is there to lose, really? Search? Someone will take their place. Instant gratification online ordering (not funded by ads but fuck it) orchestrating modern slavery? We'l be fine. Facebook products? Might be a bit of a panic as chat for 50% of the world population goes down, but we'll manage. RCS is good now, matrix is right there, we'll manage. TikTok? We'l be fine.
Pretty much any thing funded by advertising is not vital to society (otherwise they could make you pay for it) and like half of it is parasitic.
Is there any cloud that is ad-supported? AFAIK, all of them (including google) is supported by charging directly for it and/or bundling it a different purchase (physical phone, software subscription, etc.)
I'm referring here to Instagram / Facebook. How are you going to send your wedding or vacation or dog photos to your network? Mass email? The social platforms have a utility for most people at this point.
I, for one, would love to see the existing incumbents fail, and a mad scramble by upstarts to do this better. This could be done way, way, way better, and I would love to see what happened if the network effect got out of the way of that happening.
I quit all social media and gave up my smartphone. I don't miss that brief "huh, that's nice" moment when being seeing an acquaintance's random photo they felt they had to share, and moments when visual imagery are shared now feel much more special.
If they have an utility, people will pay for it (they don't even have to pay as much as they pay indirectly via advertising).
If not, not gonna miss it
But that advertising money still come from somewhere and someone, right? Surely there is some other way to make those someones to spend that money on the internet and all related technology?
Back in 2015, there was this "The Website Obesity Crisis" talk that claimed [0], among other things, that in fact most money in the ad industry is coming not from the ad-seeing consumers, but from VC investors. Has something changed in 7 years? Or was it never true in the first place?
Well, I have to say though, those little influencers do deliver results.
I have spoken with many of them and they come up with ideas regarding gamification, retention and acquisition being far superior to the ad networks.
They have a community and I would hire some of them on the spot, no need, though, some of them earn my salary many times over.
The ad networks might be ok for flight by night ops like selling viagra copies on porn websites, but they will always be that annoying pop up, I am not sure it they count towards the result if people have ad blockers.
Or let me ask, which businesses can actually convert measurably from ad networks? Assuming life time value of customers being more than 50 usd.
Its always sold as for "brand propagation", an excuse to inform you ahead that no conversion at all will happen.
If you have a fast paces business which relies on large throughput and a constantl flow of new customers it is not very useful.
I know facebook could convert very well, but they will not allow any product.
I know I'm dreaming and it will never happen, but still... let me dream.