Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Unfortunately, for most technology startups there are exactly two ways to pay salaries to the developers: getting investors (which lead to the exact cycle that I explained earlier) or paywalling the site up the wazoo (which leads to the community being necessarily smaller than it could have been otherwise).
And even with no capitalism involved in the equation, how do we convince the government to get taxpayers to foot the bill for something as mundane as an image hosting service? Especially in an environment where even art and education are being severely restricted in cash flow due to them being “non-essential services”?
If ad companies would be paid according to customer conversion rate instead of how many ads they spam everywhere, it would collapse within a financial quarter.
Thinking that people support a brand or product that constantly annoys them is next-level stupid, but it’s their main strategy. Google’s conversion rate is less than 4% and instead of realizing that spamming trillions of ads on every site is causing that abysmal rate, they double down and get off to bigger “reach”.
Also, Google lied to customers of their TrueView ads and just presented people muted autoplay ads instead. Here’s an analysis about that.
Looks like the add-supported-free-stuff business model really is collapsing.
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As aptly explained by writer Cory Doctorow:
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Unfortunately, for most technology startups there are exactly two ways to pay salaries to the developers: getting investors (which lead to the exact cycle that I explained earlier) or paywalling the site up the wazoo (which leads to the community being necessarily smaller than it could have been otherwise).
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And even with no capitalism involved in the equation, how do we convince the government to get taxpayers to foot the bill for something as mundane as an image hosting service? Especially in an environment where even art and education are being severely restricted in cash flow due to them being “non-essential services”?
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If ad companies would be paid according to customer conversion rate instead of how many ads they spam everywhere, it would collapse within a financial quarter.
Thinking that people support a brand or product that constantly annoys them is next-level stupid, but it’s their main strategy. Google’s conversion rate is less than 4% and instead of realizing that spamming trillions of ads on every site is causing that abysmal rate, they double down and get off to bigger “reach”.
Also, Google lied to customers of their TrueView ads and just presented people muted autoplay ads instead. Here’s an analysis about that.
https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-trueview-ads
tl;dr the only one benefitting from ads is Google.
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