Ethan Zuckerman’s self-expose “The Internet’s Original Sin” is an interesting deep dive into monetizing user generated content, discussing the impacts that the invention of pop-up ads have had, despite their innocuous beginnings.
An advertising revenue model can be an effective way to generate revenue with minimal effort. This is true for our app as well, and if we had a large enough user base, would allow us to generate a ton of revenue for not too much upkeep. However, for our product, advertisements may take away from the purpose of our app. It would be easy to add an ad for every other time a user toggles their status, but it would be annoying, and a crucial deterrent for users. This affects individual well-beings by distracting them from their overall purpose of connecting with others, and it could reach the rate that they no longer attempt to use our product if the frequency of ads popping up is too high. In addition, the risk to reward ratio of seeing an ad versus the possibility to connect with friends is quite variable. If our user base is small, and not a lot of their friends have adopted our app, advertising could lead to a downwards spiral and more people would be unwilling to use or try our product.
In terms of the internet, however, an advertising revenue model can be beneficial. Some sites that are dependent on user clicks and views, such as news sites and blogs, benefit greatly from advertisements, which show up on the edge of their code product, and while occasionally annoying, are outweighed by the benefit of the product. This advertising revenue is cheap to implement, and highly effective, while dependent on high traffic. However, the cons of this model is that our internet is becoming increasingly more saturated with advertisements of all types.
