Q: What are the pros and cons of an advertising revenue model for your product, and the internet overall?
A: I don’t think an advertising revenue model is appropriate for our product, primarily because we aren’t really operating on a traditional a business-to-consumer market or, quite frankly, a traditional business-to-business model. EliteExec’s marketing strategy is primarily geared towards promoting exclusivity and word-of-mouth advertising, and an advertising revenue model seems contrary to that goal.
There are few pros to advertising revenue for us, and the only serious one I would take into consideration is a small cash cushion for us. Yet the cons far outweigh it — we depend on reputation to get us customers and clients, and I personally don’t trust a website with too many ads on it as a reputable one.
With regards to the internet, I first discovered the idea of the advertising model with Tim Hwang’s book Subprime Attention Crisis , published in 2020, but I’m not surprised that this article came out even earlier. I really think that the advertising model has been a huge waste of time, money, and effort and serves no purpose other than to engorge itself on more money — but at the same time, the huge amount of money generated from these schemes have allowed companies like Google to try a bunch of new things, try new products, and do philanthropy through Google.org, etc.
But philanthropy is no substitute for the potential positive good of an Internet that truly works for everyone, rather than becoming a series of walled gardens that produce the increasingly ripened fruit of user data for data-collection and advertising companies to pick. I have to believe that there is a better way to run the internet. It would be a failure of imagination and human effort to not.
