The advantages of an advertising revenue model for my team’s products is that it can generate revenue for the company without having to directly charge the college students. As many may know, college students are not financially stable yet and more importantly, are not often willing to spend money if they don’t have to. Within our user interviews, we recognized a pattern that college students are relatively “cheap” compared to adults later on in their lives because they are young and do not have a steady income. Therefore, if we had to charge college students to use our website and service, it may drive away many potential customers. Looking more generally at the internet, advertising revenue models may be beneficial because it allows users to access websites for free and they also may find a product recommendation useful. Additionally, it is beneficial for companies because they can avoid charger viewers which increases their user base and advertising companies can reach more potential customers.
The disadvantages of an advertising revenue model for my team’s product is that it can be distracting from the actual service we are providing. Users may get overwhelmed by many ads and steer away from using our platform. Furthermore, they may become concerned about the privacy of their data when they see extremely targeted ads. On the other hand, they may be annoyed at entirely irrelevant content. Either way, ads on our website can decrease the quality of the user experience. For the general internet, I agree with the podcast that ads have normalized tracking user data. This can be very concerning to users as there is a general lack of transparency of exactly what user data is collected. Also, ads may not be effective to the advertising businesses because of the public’s negative perception of ads.
