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This was a big part of why I enjoyed Jack Dorsey's comments on Twitter removing political advertising. The Internet was supposed to be a democratizing force, a

This was a big part of why I enjoyed Jack Dorsey's comments on Twitter removing political advertising. The Internet was supposed to be a democratizing force, and it was, for awhile. To an extent it still is, but as the convergence of content continues to pull people into the various Platforms™, all of which are supported by advertiser dollars, the content itself is diluted. Some not so much, some so much it's not recognizable, others so much that it's no longer there. YouTube is a great example of this. Once a monument to the power of democratized content, it's slowly but surely pushing out real creators in favor of advertising companies producing advertiser-friendly and oh-so-clickable content, much of which is complete and utter trash. It's not just marketing companies though, a new breed of creator has spawned since roughly 2010, determined to soak as many advertising dollars out of the platform as they can with as much vapid and soulless content as it will suffer. And all of this is sponsored in turn by equally vapid and soulless corporate advertisers, determined to make sure their precious brands are not associated with anything as uncouth as an opinion or a real person. Hell, there's a great argument to be made of how the "pivot to video" and the resulting catacombs full of gutted and destroyed media websites can be laid at the feet of corporate marketers who wanted video ads. Nay it was not any Internet citizen who claimed the future was video, we didn't ask for it, and we certainly didn't like it. The whole thing is gross, and far from isolated to YouTube, it has plagued them all, save perhaps for Twitter and I think the only thing saving Twitter is that it's just not as easily monetized. But, Twitter has a different problem, which I believe Jack is trying to solve; the influx of automated bots, bought and paid for by other marketers, more often trying to sell politics than products. But it's just a different kind of feces from the same anus and indicative of the same core problem: advertisers suck, at everything. And they have more power than ever on the Internet, and so the Internet sucks more than ever.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
We need to think about why advertising is winning. A big reason is that advertising is a tax deduction. If I fund my content with advertising, the advertiser gets to deduct the money they spend from their income tax. If I sell content to users, the users don't get to do that. Between the employer and employee halves of FICA, federal withholding and state income tax, that's typically more than half the money. To make it even we would either need a tax deduction for purchasing content or to get rid of the one for buying advertising. Then you have companies like Apple taking a 30% cut of the creator's revenue. The customer has to pay $1.43 in order for the creator to get $1. That's obviously making direct purchases less competitive against advertising -- and it multiplies with the tax treatment. If you're paying 50% in tax and then 30% to Apple, the customer needs to earn ~$2.86 for every $1 they want the creator to get. If two content creators start with $1 and use it buy each other's content, by the time the money goes to the other person and back one time, what's left is only ~$0.12. It would be a lot easier to sell content if the creators actually got the lion's share of the customer's money.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

We need to think about why advertising is winning. A big reason is that advertising is a tax deduction. If I fund my content with advertising, the advertiser gets to deduct the money they spend from their income tax. If I sell content to users, the users don't get to do that. Between the employer and employee halves of FICA, federal withholding and state income tax, that's typically more than half the money. To make it even we would either need a tax deduction for purchasing content or to get rid of the one for buying advertising. Then you have companies like Apple taking a 30% cut of the creator's revenue. The customer has to pay $1.43 in order for the creator to get $1. That's obviously making direct purchases less competitive against advertising -- and it multiplies with the tax treatment. If you're paying 50% in tax and then 30% to Apple, the customer needs to earn ~$2.86 for every $1 they want the creator to get. If two content creators start with $1 and use it buy each other's content, by the time the money goes to the other person and back one time, what's left is only ~$0.12. It would be a lot easier to sell content if the creators actually got the lion's share of the customer's money.