I read Ethan Zuckerman’s article on creating the pop-up ad for this company Tripod and further contributing to how advertising became the default business model on the web, the “original sin”. Linked here at “The Internet’s Original Sin”.
In this blog post, I’ll be going more in depth into pros and cons of advertising for my team product’s success, as well for the internet. My product is DrawMaster Pro, a mix of Canva and Procreate and in the future, Adobe. We’re an innovative drawing app used by digital artists, illustrators, and creative professionals worldwide.
Pros of an advertising revenue model for DrawMaster Pro are that we need a differentiator from current platforms such as Canva and Procreate, and personalized advertising may help us appeal to new or overlapping audiences so that we can increase market share. We also have 5 million MAU and therefore we have a larger user base that advertisers may want to take advantage of. I’ve not heard of an ad blocker on IPad, so we’d not have to worry about ad blockers taking up our revenue.
Cons of an advertising revenue model for DrawMaster Pro would that given we’re already asking users to pay for our app (at least on IPad), we’re not giving them a premium experience that is usually expected with paying money for an app. Our competitors also do not show ads when on the premium or paid app. If we were to release a free app on mobile (like Adobe Lightroom), there would be grounds for us to be ad-supported. Low-quality ads could also affect our app’s professional reputation.
For the internet, I wonder that if we were to start selling packages for professional and digital artists (and made those ad-supported), if we’d just be adding to user monetization fatigue, which hurts user experience and increases resistance to ads on our platform in the future.
