- What are the pros and cons of an advertising revenue model for your product, and the internet overall?
Pros for the internet:
– More likely that agreeable ads will be shown to consumers.
– More likely to increase ad efficiency in which companies get better value for their marketing dollars. This may cause less marketing spending overall and more productive spending.
– Online ads is cheap. This means its easier for rising firms to challenge behemoths.
Cons:
– More data is needed so privacy concerns are massive.
– As suggested in the article, targeting-by-demographics is statistically weaker than by intent. So, we are believing a fiction of efficacy.
Our model:
We are building a digitally native telehealth service for empowering care givers of autism. Supporting an ad based model will feel pervasive in a medical device. I cannot imagine ads popping up in My Health or another hospital driven app. The psychological barrier of mixing ads and healthcare is large in my opinion. This is similar to how people freaked out when Gmail had ads because they thought their financial/professional data is at risk.
- Optional: How (and why) does this model affect individual well-being? What are ways to reduce the negative impacts of this revenue model?
Designing an addictive cycle to increase time spent to harness more eyes on ads is disastrous for mental health of users. Users do not look at the ads but companies claim users are looking at the ad for 45 mins a day (like Facebook’s claim). Switching to measuring engagement with ads might reduce facebook’s incentive to retain user’s eyes. Furthermore, audits on the performance of the ads should be done by third party. It’s a conflict of interest for a provider (like Twitter) to audit their own service (i.e. you got X clicks and Y minutes of attention).
