Almost every team/company would at least think of using advertising as their business revenue model for their products. That brings me back to the class session when my team were trying to come up with the revenue streams for our BMC. We wrote down what popped to our mind immediately, then we went down the list of other business models. And we saw advertising. We did not think it fits into our vision of the product that naturally, but we were like, why not? This conversation in our group points to an important pitfall of an advertising revenue model for our product and the internet overall already. As designers, we did not even consider advertising as an option that would intrude people’s data privacy and data safety in an ethical way. We only consider it an easy option to create some extra revenue. It, in turn, demonstrates the point made by the podcast episode. As users, we have “grown too comfortable with the idea of being under surveillance”, and we are so used to idea of our data is being collected that we all accept the fact that we are paying with our data in exchange of free services without even noticing.
The pro of using advertising as the business revenue model for our product is (1) an easy go-to for our company to make money, (2) our customers would not feel like they are directly paying for our service other than the food they want to be delivered. This could be especially beneficial for us at the early stage of our business since we have so many competitors in the food delivery market. If we can minimize the costs college students would have to pay, it can certainly serve as an incentive for them to try our product. However, the con of this business revenue model (other than the pitfall mentioned above overall) is that it can contradict with the sense of home we are trying to create with our product. The incorporation of ads would make customers feel that we are just another common food delivery business.
