Some questions for Zuckerman (and myself, and perhaps even for those Washington): Why is surveillance bad? Why are targeted ads bad for me? Would I rather see ads for baby diapers or ads for the next game coming out on Xbox? One is a lot more relevant to me than the other. I think we have a societal norm/belief that surveillance is bad and privacy is good but I haven’t heard a concrete reason for why that’s the case? Bad people can do bad things with your data but I would imagine our democratic institutions are strong enough to prevent the government from doing bad things with our data and to prevent private companies from doing bad things with our data. To be clear, I don’t particularly view targeted ads as bad things and selling data to others is not bad as long as they too are prevented by the government from doing bad things with our data.
For our product, the biggest pro of an advertising revenue model is it removes budgetary pressures from creating and marketing a free app intended for the masses. Our free product is not going to generate revenue from 95% of users since they likely won’t convert to a paid model. The 5% that do convert may not generate enough revenue to justify this project or maybe, the 5% ends up being more like 1%. It is hard to tell but going with an advertising revenue model de-risks our product.
The biggest con would likely be that we are compromising on our brand and aesthetic. We are a drawing tool catering for users that likely highly value aesthetic appeal. Our brand is part of our value and the sleekness and cleaness of our UI/UX is something that users have come to expect and appreciate. If we begin compromising on that for ads, we risk losing some of our existing users and depreciating our brand value. Financially it may not make sense if we can quantify the impact of ads on decreasing brand value.
For the internet overall, I am divided as suggested by my questions above. Sure one could argue that targeted ads or surveillance are bad but the benefit of being able to call/text anybody in the world for free (WhatsApp) far outweighs it. This unrivaled network of knowledge that is the web is a free and truly democratic resource open to anybody. In a way, it is a government of its own and like any government, it needs taxes to function.
