The Internet’s Original Sin

This is a relevant question for our product, Quinn, which is a fashion recommendation product. Our product aims to provide inspiration and direction for young Americans interested in growing or improving their fashion sense, and we plan to do this by presenting outfit ideas from a variety of sources alongside recommending specific clothing items for the user to buy. Naturally, we considered an advertisement revenue model, which could take form as embedded ads throughout the application for fashion brands and services as well as sponsored clothing item suggestions. It follows that a major pro of this model for our product is that our users already have intent—they are already interested in adding new items to their wardrobe, so it makes sense for both us and fashion brands to be partners in this act. However, as the article depicts, perhaps this is just “the easiest model for a web startup to implement;” this pro, which we have identified ourselves, is the pro that most teams out there on the Internet who have chosen to pursue an advertising revenue model have also identified. We are quite similar to Pinterest, and “Pinterest is a site that runs on investor storytime.” Though our goal is to genuinely help the user improve their fashion style, fogging up the user’s feed and user experience with sponsored content does not seem to prioritize the quality of content that we are presenting to the user. Subsequently, one con of this model that has been seen with examples on the Internet overall is that it will also be natural for this to keep going down a dangerous route of selling user data—purchasing habits, demographics, clothing item preferences, etc.—to fashion companies. Given these considerations, I have been thinking more about perhaps a subscription model, or a freemium model. There are constraints we could consider such as limiting the number of recommendations or searches per day, or “Later” and “Much Later” features that could be gated behind a paywall.