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Why pays the advertiser? More often than not it's me and you when we buy something online, even if we never click on ads. Advertisement is just another cost of
by guntars 5y ago
Why pays the advertiser? More often than not it's me and you when we buy something online, even if we never click on ads. Advertisement is just another cost of doing business and it's built into the price. I can't imagine paying for content via all these middlemen would be more efficient than paying for it directly. That said, what's different is who's doing the paying and I suspect that a small minority of users are paying for everyone.
- acdha 5y agoDon’t forget offline sales, too – the profit margin on one person buying a $60k SUV pays for a ton of ad sales, which is why you see so many ads for big ticket items. Direct cost efficiency isn’t the only factor: I think site operators value the simplicity of not needing a relationship with each visitor (especially internationally) or needing to ask permission to access content, and visitors like that they don’t have a taxi meter ticking as they browse around. I’m definitely not saying the system is perfect but any time something is this resistant to change I would assume it’s better at a factor we’re not considering. Ads certainly aren’t perfect and the major publishers would drop Google/Facebook in a heartbeat if they thought they could afford it, so I would look at proposed replacements from that perspective. A blockchain based system has a few obvious challenges but the biggest one for me is the assumption that enough people don't like ads enough to pay a comparable amount of money & deal with thinking about transactions. That experiment has been tried enough times that I think the failures are an important lesson about revealed consumer preferences.