Zuckerman writes that “advertising is the original sin of the web.” Companies like Facebook has a large amount of user-generated content, but they cannot explicitly endorse all of this content that contains controversial or competing view. Therefore, Facebook cannot profit directly off of this content. To solve this, Zuckerman writes how the workaround is to “shape both what ads and what content [users] see.” By using content as a way to collect user preferences, the business now becomes about how to target better ads to users, without actually caring what content they look at (to some extent).
The pros of an advertising revenue for pool (and the internet overall):
- We can see what loyalty points they use, and better targets ads like happy hours to them based on what chains they actually holds points for
- We enable robust profiles on users that can be connected to other blockchain-based services that interface with the internet, so users can make their profile and preferences interoperable
The cons:
- Users may want to hide their profile and preferences from advertisers, which is something they can do if they own their data
- Users may not want targeted ads, which makes this business model difficult to push
