We Know What You Did Response

The podcast largely shifted the way I view advertising as a business model.  I really had not thought about the ethics of advertising and whether the world (Internet) would be a better place if it had never existed.  I was really struck by the thought that maybe in the beginning we should have considered why we don’t just ask people to pay for what they want; instead, we have this backwards way of tricking them into “paying” for what they want.  Although people do not feel like they are paying, the amount that is being made off them by collecting their data could arguable be much more valuable than a small sum they would have to pay to see a certain piece of content. 

One of the pros of using an advertising revenue model is that the user does not “feel” like they are paying — they don’t have to follow a traditional checkout flow where you may enter a form of payment.  Another possible pro would be that the company really does not have to put in that much effort to figure out how they are going to make money.  They don’t have to figure out if their margins are going to be large enough on a certain good; they just use more ads or more expensive ads when they need to be making more money.  Additionally, businesses can incentivize users to pay more for a service is they remove the adds.  A final pro that I want to mention is that companies can use ads and ad clicks to collect data on a customer.  This data can then be used or resold for a sum of money. 

A con of an advertising revenue model is that people find ads to be quite annoying.  As we heard in the podcast, Zuckerman felt the need to publicly apologize many many years later for simply creating the idea (even though he never predicted how they would be used today).  Another con is that they do not always match up perfectly with what the user is actually interested in or wants to see.  In fact, the ads can sometimes be quite offensive to people when they see ads that don’t align with a certain aspect of their identity.  As we heard in the podcast, sometimes ads can be put on pages that contradict or are not supported by the original page that it occupies.