I wanted to make a product and sell it directly to people who’d care about its quality. There’s an incredible connection possible when you align your financial motivations with the service of your users. It’s an entirely different category of work than if you’re simply trying to capture eyeballs and sell their attention, privacy, and dignity in bulk to the highest bidder.
Saved by phoebe and
We want work to be financially valued without compromising our integrity. We want to make meaningful work that we're proud of, not please an algorithm. We want to share work in ways that feel right to us, not compete for attention on a feed. We want to feel seen without our creativity and identities being exploited.
The thing that was really most important, as a startup—though by then we weren't really a startup—by then we were public, but a young company—is the relationship that we had built with our customers. We wanted them to feel that a) they were given a decent deal and that b) they trusted us to lead them to where they needed to go. So
The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use.
As with AdSense, big is not where the leverage is. Rather this new corner of ad space liberates the small to middle—a billion businesses who would have never thought of, let alone ever got around to, developing a cool advertising campaign. With a peer-to-peer system, these ads would be created by passionate (and greedy) users and unleashed virally
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