For the past several years I have been telling family and friends that the ad revenue model for content is a mania and that it will eventually see a big collapse.
Today this sounds like crazy talk. I say this not for those reading today; they will already be rolling their eyes at the notion. No, these words are not for today's readers whose herding instincts make them believe that nothing is possible but an extension of the status quo but rather for those readers of tomorrow for when I link back to this post in the future.
This prediction is not a random guess folks, but rather a logical extension of my long standing model about the rise and fall of credit and how it impacts society. And I don't just talk the talk, I walk the walk. This blog was created with the charter of never having ad support. When and if I feel that I've built enough credibility with my views and with my charting models, I'll find a way to charge for access. But to burden everyone with ridiculous pop up ads which spread viruses and take over your computer, well, I'm just not going to have any part of that. With a current hit rate of about 17000 per month, that is walking away from $500+ dollars per month and perhaps even more because of the subject matter (money, trading, etc. commands a higher price than gardening advice).
In any case, I can't stand ads. I will not watch live TV, period, because the ads not only waste my valuable time trying to sell me things that I am not in the market for, they also try to program our brains using well researched techniques that basically target our herding nature. Nobody is completely immune to this and so you are best off avoid it completely.
I think that the explosion in the use of ads has been driven by the explosion in the existence of products that most people don't need. The build of these products has, for the most part, been financed. This is how we end up 19 trillion dollars in debt whether people understand it or not.
19.
Trillion.
As in Trillion with a T.
It's unpayable and when people finally accept that fact, debt financed product production and consumption will collapse and the ad based revenue model, which is driven by the need to raise your product's visibility in a virtual cacophony of product offerings, will collapse as well. I believe that we are now beginning to see the herd admitting this truth and the ad based revenue model will be one of the first casualties.
My high powered marketing friends think I am crazy for believing this since it has worked so well for so long but over the past few years they have seen so many of my predictions come true that they are now a lot less quick to tell me that to my face. They are beginning to see that these things are not really just driven by seat of the pants insight but rather by a model based perception of the world.
In any case, I will begin adding evidentiary posts to this theme as I see them happening and today's is a proclamation by Mathew Weiner of "Mad Men" fame that ads are irritating TV fans. Importantly, ad based revenue is how his TV show is funded yet there he is biting the hand that feeds him. His real complaint, even though he does not know this is the case, is that ad based revenue is losing its margins. In other words, its effectiveness is waning and thus the attempt to make up for this with lowering the per spot cost of advertizing but making up for it with ads ad nauseam.
As conservatism wakes people up, the power of suggestion, which is a well understood component of Alister Crowley's definition of the the term "magick", loses its hold on the herd. People can now ignore that desperately flashing web page ad while they read the content and they find themselves less and less likely or interested or piqued to go click on that link that talks about "the shocking truth about [put link to face anti-aging cream or other bullshit here]". In fact what used to draw people's attention in is becoming a repellent not just to the ad itself, but to the content next to the ad. It was advance understanding of this direction which caused me to charter this blog around no ads, ever.
Needless to say, I think Google had better begin doing something profitable soon besides ads because the herd can change direction on a dime and if Google thinks the profits from ad based activity will go on forever then it could be tempted to continue to piss away its time and money doing so many other unprofitable things. But nobody sees these things coming until it is too late and thus I believe that darker days are ahead for GOOG.
This is a terrific insight, Capt'n. It follows that the distortion in production caused by easy credit resulted in an over supply of stuff that needs to be pitched aggressively in order to sell.
ReplyDeleteI had no idea how bad Internet advertising was until last week. I use a browser extension that blocks ads on the big screen computers. But not on the small screen computers, because the default Android browser doesn't support extensions and this is the same engine used by other apps that need one. Though websites trim ads down dramatically fit mobile devices, they still exist and some can be more than annoying, but offensive.
So I figured that at least at home I could use an alliance computer as the filter fit the home network. This way, I could get rid of ads on the mobile devices as well, including those pesky ads inside apps. When developing this solution, I turned off the ad blocking extension on the laptop for testing and immediately sites and blogs that I visit often displayed extremely invasive ads taking the whole screen and even playing music. Without blocking ads it would be just too unbearable to visit such websites. So much so that their content is not worth such a disrespectful approach to generating revenue.
And, as you said, Google's dominion may face a challenge as the credit winds down, sometime in the not so distant future.
BTW, I'm glad to say that the solution worked and all the computers at home, no matter the screen size, are much more pleasant to use now.