Advertising and Web3

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

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

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

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

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

People who hate ads, like people who hate money and capitalism, don’t end up designing some better, less morally-compromised version of the world without those things: they just end up bitter at those who mastered the supposed evils.

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

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