Advertising being allowed to become the dominant monetization method for the internet was a mistake.
I’ve never seen anything that makes most of its money from advertising that doesn’t get worse and worse for it over time as a result. Once you let the advertisers in they will ruin whatever it is they are being allowed to leech off of. Might take 1 year, might take 20, but once they get that foot hold they will run it into the ground because like a billionaire and money, it is never enough.
So I work at DeviantArt, and we actually saw this in real-time. A few years ago, we added external ads all over the place, and had to add a whole framework to detect “ad-unsafe” works that wouldn’t get ads served against them. So we only got ads against a percentage of views, and people were getting pissed at the ads and leaving.
So we tore the ads back out, traffic’s recovered, and a focus on providing actual tools for artists to make money through the site has meant we’re doing better without ads than we were with ads.
Advertising being allowed to become the dominant monetization method for the internet was a mistake.
I’ve never seen anything that makes most of its money from advertising that doesn’t get worse and worse for it over time as a result. Once you let the advertisers in they will ruin whatever it is they are being allowed to leech off of. Might take 1 year, might take 20, but once they get that foot hold they will run it into the ground because like a billionaire and money, it is never enough.
So I work at DeviantArt, and we actually saw this in real-time. A few years ago, we added external ads all over the place, and had to add a whole framework to detect “ad-unsafe” works that wouldn’t get ads served against them. So we only got ads against a percentage of views, and people were getting pissed at the ads and leaving.
So we tore the ads back out, traffic’s recovered, and a focus on providing actual tools for artists to make money through the site has meant we’re doing better without ads than we were with ads.
that’s the thing. People will generally support a service they like. If it has ads, most people won’t like it and thus won’t support it.
Extend that from “advertisers” to “capitalists” and you’ll be much more correct.