The Changing Face of Ads
When you are getting something for free, you are probably what’s being sold. The internet was built by believers in openness and sharing. To keep it free, those pioneers entered a devils bargain with advertisers. To keep the internet accessible to all it became acceptable to sell users attention. This was not a novel problem.
The first true attention merchants were the newspapermen of the 1830’s. Benjamin Day was able to dramatically reduce the price of a newspaper by selling his audience to advertisers. This democratized the news, making it available to many more people. It also resulted in a race to the bottom with an increase in spectacular attention seeking stories.
Before pirate radio stations became a problem in the 1960’s there was originally the problem of pirate listeners at the advent of radio broadcasts in the 1920’s. In England closed receivers were sold, set at a specific frequency which required a paid license to use. Radio hobbyists and scientists deemed this untenable. This a second license was created for them. This was of course taken advantage of by pirate listeners who just wanted to listen to their favorite podcast without paying. This led to complex legislative solutions. It was suggested that ““the experimenter may listen to the ‘Beggar’s Opera’ purely for the purpose of comparison, but he must not listen to it for enjoyment” . This problem was solves in two ways in the US. At the beginning of the advent of radio, stations were finance by the makers of radios, to sell more of them. The original branded content. It wasn’t much later that ads blanketed the airwaves.
Many people hate ad’s. The decrease in NFL ratings and cable packages can be tied into a desire to avoid the rampant advertising in television media. This exodus is occurring along with the rapid ris in ad free options like HBO, Netflix and Amazon Video. Like many people I find ad-block to be essential. Thus, the church and state wall between editorial and advertising has swiftly crumbled. The rise of native advertising has meant that content is coming to look more and more like it is selling you something. Google factors sponsored content out of its google news search results. However the realization that sponsored content is fundamentally at odds with Google’s current advertising revenue model. It doesn’t matter how well you auction ad slots if nobody wants to click them.
The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu