Why I Work on Ads

Web2 is great at monetizing artificial scarcity through paywalls for stuff like content, courses, and communities. Web2 is also great at monetizing attention through ads. But as we’ve seen, ad platforms heavily favor large creators and optimize for certain engagement metrics that aren’t always in the best interest of people consuming the content. S... See more

And you have to wrestle with the paywall and its very unfortunate trade-off. You want to share your work with the widest audience possible. But to any publication that’s too small for ads, free readers are simply not that valuable. For these reasons, I’ve always struggled with the paywall. Asking people to pay for writing is not a great way to make... See more

The default method of getting to where I want to on the web is search. By putting content behind a paywall it’s non-existent for the Google Bot, which is bad for driving traffic (potential customers) to your site and constructing an interlinked narrative. It’s also bad for generating any kind of virality. Because of those reasons almost all paid ne... See more