Our product, StudioHub, provides working professionals with tools to showcase their holistic professional digital identity. We do this through building tools that aid in the creation of your profile. Currently, our product uses a freemium business model where users who pay for the premium features get extra tools and can be better discovered by potential recruiters.
A pro of using an advertising revenue model for our product is that we could keep our product completely free for all users. Right now, there is a big disparity in which users who have the financial means to pay more have better profiles and, as a result, better job opportunities. This furthers income inequality and economic disparity. However, by using advertising, we can ensure that the tools we offer to each user are equal for all, leveling the playing field and making a more equitable platform.
However, the cons of using an advertising revenue model are drastic. For one, our platform already collects considerable data about our users. Therefore, it is likely that by using advertising as a revenue model, our business could generate a lot of profit since it has a lot of data it can sell. This will incentivize our company to continue collecting data from our users at the cost of their privacy. Furthermore, the ads that would be on our platform are likely to be of a professional nature due to the customer base of our product. Already, LinkedIn’s ads are bad for people’s emotional well-being because it causes users on the platform to feel like they are falling behind their peers, spammed by recruiters, and receiving a lot of junk mail messages. StudioHub falls into the same pitfalls if we were to begin using advertising as a revenue model.
