Everything is an ad network

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

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

To see what’s radically different between web1 and web3, consider the example of Brave Browser: advertisers pay the browser’s users to watch ads through Brave’s native token, with users making more than twice as much revenue as Brave itself. Users take the place of the traditional ad platform, even as they’re directly incentivized to share Brave it... 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

I’m dubious that much else of Web 2 will survive the hop to Web 3, either from the tech or consumer point of view. The one thing I’m absolutely convinced will have to exist for Web 3 to succeed is effective and natively on-chain attribution that gives NFTs and other virtual goods their due (and gets their owners paid).

The other argument for Web3, one that I think is a bit generous, but worth considering, is that Web3 solves a central problem with the way we’ve made money online for the last three decades: scale. In an internet determined by advertisers, everything must reach a level of scale that is both impossible to maintain, and possibly unhealthy for society... See more