Pool plans to make revenue in two main ways: taking a small transaction fee and charging businesses a subscription to use the service. However, in the future, Pool may also add a third revenue stream in the form of advertising and promotions. In this scenario, we imagine that businesses could pay Pool to promote themselves and special deals. Pool is a platform primarily meant to help businesses and customers connect, and we believe that allowing advertising could help support that goal. Advertising would help businesses reach new customers and would help customers find new businesses. Advertising on Pool would be relevant to users and non-invasive.
That being said, allowing advertising on Pool may also harm smaller businesses on our platform. During interviews with small businesses, many small businesses noted that one of their major challenges is competing with large businesses with large advertising and online marketing budgets. Part of Pool’s mission is to help small businesses reach customers without spending large amounts of money on online advertising, so it’s possible that promoting businesses that pay more on our app would go against part of Pool’s mission. To mitigate this, perhaps Pool could limit the amount that advertisements are used and explicitly call out any advertisements.
For the Internet overall, advertising certainly has pros and cons. On the one hand, it allows businesses to offer products to customers for “free” that people may not otherwise be able to access. On the other hand, it misaligns companies’ incentives, rewarding behavior and content that drives ad revenue and clicks rather than content that is good, informative, and interesting.
