Advertising and Web3

The affluent, early-adopter users who are mostly likely to pay $ᵤ are also those users with highest $ₐ, as advertising to them commands a premium. Unless you enforced discriminatory subscription pricing to users, based on the counterfactual of their potential ad revenue, you’d still be better off advertising to the people willing to drop $10/month ... See more

Lastly, what data you can claim to be yours is usually not worth the trouble to engineer a whole payment scheme around. If you opt out of hyper-targeting on Facebook (the ‘Custom Audiences’ toggle you can maybe find a dozen levels deep in your Facebook settings screen), your ARPU, i.e. the revenue Facebook makes off of you, doesn’t go to zero. That... See more

Advertising is worth saving, and while Web3 will indeed enable all sorts of new business models, we should not be so quick to discard the mechanism that funded most of what we treasure about the ‘first draft of history’ called journalism (and much else besides). Certainly, any discussion of the advertising future which starts with some morality pla... See more

Crypto will be a total clusterfuck for privacy, as the foundational tenets of the blockchain—distributed data across many machines with no central control, inalterable data, public data around pseudonymous (or anonymous) identity, permissionless reading and writing—are utterly antithetical to all contemporary privacy thinking. It’s hard to think of... See more

At the global level, countries with mature media markets like the US and EU subsidize the service for those in developing countries where the user value is low as a matter of national economics. Facebook could never support WhatsApp in the Global South without the rich North paying the bills (just a little reminder to those who view advertising as ... See more

Most people pay to read their own views and moral narratives echoed back at themselves in more articulate and compelling form

The ads game is a triangle trade between user, publisher and advertiser, that at its most reductionist looks like this: A publisher provides a service, website, app or other user experience for free to a user, who pays nothing for that service, while some advertiser pays for a tiny slice of the user’s attention, and pays the publisher an amount $ₐ ... See more

The hard reality is that $ₐ is much much greater than $ᵤ for an enormous number of media experiences. It was never the lack of micro-payment solutions that meant advertising for content had to exist; it’s merely the fact that $ₐ > $ᵤ for most users on many services. Thus, facilitating seamless payment via tokens doesn’t necessarily impact the under... See more

When people are paying with their own hard-earned nickels, there isn’t actually much of a market for ‘truth’ and both-sides objectivity. Nobody other than people whose livelihoods depend on it (e.g. Wall Street traders or industry insiders) are willing to pay for actual truthful news, which is why outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg ... See more

The problem ‘akshually’ is that contemporary programmatic advertising is too efficient, and the ads sales people at The New York Times selling outrageously priced ads on a fixed, rate-card basis were selling media not really worth the cost (when measured at the level of precision the internet makes possible). Decades worth of such advertising mispr... See more