How A Failure of Selling Ad Slots Can Endanger Lives During Humanitarian Crises
When Hurricane Dorian impacted the Bahamas, there were some unmapped regions of the islands that slowed down the search for missing persons. Using satellite images, volunteers mapped these regions and their components. These areas are often left unmapped by commercial mapping companies because it would be unprofitable to map them due to a lack of online advertisers willing to buy ad space in these regions. There are times when mapping is crucial to help communities, such as in times of disease or natural disaster, but it is often lacking unless volunteers and locals step up through sites such as OpenStreetMap, “the ‘Wikipedia of maps’” (Lu).
The article “After Hurricane Dorian, The ‘Wikipedia Of Maps’ Came To The Rescue” by Joanne Lu relates to the search industry because it discusses online advertising. There are three options for selling ads: charges for impressions (banner ads), targeted ads, and charge for clicks on ads. In this case, ads could possibly be banner ads that pop up when people search for this region, or maybe they could be selling them through the “pay per click” method. In any case, the article states that “most map companies won’t be able to sell online ads to defray the cost of mapping remote and poor areas” because these areas are just not searched often enough. While the map sites can still hold a generalized second price auction for these ad slots, the value of them for the advertisers will be so low that it’s just not profitable to map these areas in the first place. This lack of advertiser demand for ad slots has real-life consequences that hinder rescue operations and endanger lives.