There are many pros and cons to having an advertising revenue model for your product and the internet as a whole, but as time passes, it seems like the cons outweigh the pros.
As Christina said in class, going with advertising may seem attractive, but may end up guiding your product decisions in the future.
Ads are worth more or less depending on whether you’re likely to make a purchase of what they’re advertising, but most aren’t worth very much. Most digital ads don’t perform well even if they’re targeted like Facebook’s and YouTube’s ads are. This means that companies have to prove to investors that their ads will be worth more, and this often requires moving deeper into the world of tracking.
Investor storytime, when someone pays you to tell them how rich they’ll get when you finally put ads on your site is an interesting concept. It’s described as an advertising future, or the world’s most targeted ad.
As Ceglowski says, as the hunger for user data grows and becomes even more profitable, data itself is become a more valuable asset than many products main features. A real world example is Roomba vacuums. Roomba is a valuable company not because of the cleaning prowess of their autonomous vacuums but because of the data the vacuums collect about customer house layouts.
As cases like this grow more ubiquitous, it may stifle innovation and simply lead to products that better collect our data rather than work better themselves. Online news clickbait is a perfect example of this. As this grow, people might grow more accustomed to higher surveillance as mentioned in the article about the Snowden leaks or looking at the current surveillance state of China. We must ask ourselves, is profitability for advertising worth giving up personal data and allowing ourselves to be monitored?
