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Im exhausted about people complaining about. It's a fact that targeted ads pay a lot better. This enables better services that are free to the end user. Most pe

by km3r 4y ago

Im exhausted about people complaining about. It's a fact that targeted ads pay a lot better. This enables better services that are free to the end user. Most people just don't want to pay for things. 99% of facebook users have never paid meta a dime, yet they have the audacity to complain about a free service. There are paid social media alternatives, or even self hosted ones, but by and large they fail because certain industries can't sustain off of a end user paid model. Ads are also a great progressive tool. Indirectly the rich pay more than the poor for the same service. > I'm so tired of good, useful tools and services requiring a forfeit of my privacy in order to use them You forgot free [w/ good & useful]. If the market could support paying for the services and tools instead of ads, businesses would move that way.

soupfordummies 4y ago
Disney plus ain’t free though. It’s actually one of the more expensive streamers
hakfoo 4y ago
No matter what you think of the privacy aspects, I worry that we've decided to build the entire modern tech universe around the mother of all bubbles. All manner of bad business decisions seem to be running with the assumption that back-end ad/targeting/etc. revenue will eventually patch the hole in the sides of their business model. Here's my theory for the bubble factor: You can sort of divide the ad market into four quadrants. 1) Premium advertiser, premium content. Coke and Toyota paying to be on the front page of the New York Times etc. 2) Premium advertiser, low-grade content. A lot of this is remarketing, where that damned fridge you looked at once six months ago follows you across the web. 3) Low-grade advertiser, premium content. This is likely the rarest quadrant, as it's too expensive for amateurs to play in. 4) Low-grade advertiser and content. Think of the chumboxes at the bottom of news sites. I feel like Quadrant 1 and 2 are surprisingly at risk. Premium advertisers have experts running their campaigns and analytics up the wazoo. Eventually they're going to ask "Is it worth paying Google/Meta/etc. NN% of the total spend when we could probably call top-50 publishers directly and arrange a deal? They may also be more brand-sensitive, worried about blowback from inappropriate ad placement in Quadrant 2. There is a real risk that the "better" sections of the ad market eventually graduate away from brokered networks, and eventually Google and Meta are left as a glorified Taboola. Is there a lot of money in there? Possibly, but I wonder how sustainable the money is. I suspect a lot of revenue from small advertisers is due to very poor inefficiency (bad campaign design, poorly managed spend, dark pattern tooling), and it runs a risk of death-spiraling as the quality of the network tanks. Facebook is an interesting monetization problem because the product is so intensely based on network effects. A strategy to maximize ad revenue may end up coming at the cost of some user abandonment, which is the ultimate risk for their platform. They need to thread the needle of "how creepy can we be without making people leave."

by km3r 4y ago

soupfordummies 4y ago

Disney plus ain’t free though. It’s actually one of the more expensive streamers

hakfoo 4y ago

No matter what you think of the privacy aspects, I worry that we've decided to build the entire modern tech universe around the mother of all bubbles. All manner of bad business decisions seem to be running with the assumption that back-end ad/targeting/etc. revenue will eventually patch the hole in the sides of their business model. Here's my theory for the bubble factor: You can sort of divide the ad market into four quadrants. 1) Premium advertiser, premium content. Coke and Toyota paying to be on the front page of the New York Times etc. 2) Premium advertiser, low-grade content. A lot of this is remarketing, where that damned fridge you looked at once six months ago follows you across the web. 3) Low-grade advertiser, premium content. This is likely the rarest quadrant, as it's too expensive for amateurs to play in. 4) Low-grade advertiser and content. Think of the chumboxes at the bottom of news sites. I feel like Quadrant 1 and 2 are surprisingly at risk. Premium advertisers have experts running their campaigns and analytics up the wazoo. Eventually they're going to ask "Is it worth paying Google/Meta/etc. NN% of the total spend when we could probably call top-50 publishers directly and arrange a deal? They may also be more brand-sensitive, worried about blowback from inappropriate ad placement in Quadrant 2. There is a real risk that the "better" sections of the ad market eventually graduate away from brokered networks, and eventually Google and Meta are left as a glorified Taboola. Is there a lot of money in there? Possibly, but I wonder how sustainable the money is. I suspect a lot of revenue from small advertisers is due to very poor inefficiency (bad campaign design, poorly managed spend, dark pattern tooling), and it runs a risk of death-spiraling as the quality of the network tanks. Facebook is an interesting monetization problem because the product is so intensely based on network effects. A strategy to maximize ad revenue may end up coming at the cost of some user abandonment, which is the ultimate risk for their platform. They need to thread the needle of "how creepy can we be without making people leave."