The Internet’s Love Hate Relationship with Advertising
With the maturing of social media, and another round of attempts to monetize the consumer internet, we’ve also seen another round of attacks and defenses of the dominant business model of media: advertising. But native forms like promoted tweets and sponsored articles are just the latest in a never-ending cycle/battle that has been (and perhaps always will be) raging between human culture and business’ willingness to pay for our attention.
What is this Internet Dream?
Ever since graduating from college in 1999, I’ve been a strong believer in the democratizing potential of the internet. Witnessing the emergence of Napster, Blogger, Podcasting, and Creative Commons, it seemed inevitable that citizen journalism and participatory media was going to rise up and save our democracy and culture from the commercial culture being pushed on us through TV.
During that era, I remember at the Future of Music Policy Summits I attended, the old guard was complaining about not getting paid, and my idealistic 24 year old self was completely dismissive. I thought, “The dinasaurs just need to die. The new way will be so much better.”
Social Media Revolution: “Anyone” can be heard
Then YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter exploded, giving ‘anyone’ (who had the internet) the ability to post and share pretty much anything online, changing the fundamental channel for attention online from search to social sharing. The power of virality has unlocked other crowd powered platforms from distributed petitions via Change.org, funding platforms like Kickstarter, IndieGogo and others, and even virally optimized media like Buzzfeed, Upworthy, and PolicyMic.
In many ways, the participatory media revolution happened, so the health of culture and democracy should be better, right? Wrong.
Not only are we increasingly living inside of our own filter bubbles and echo chambers, but something seems off about the fast moving clickbait culture that sharing has accelerated.
What Now? Advertising re-discovering it’s groove?
In our desire to claim the democratizing force of the open internet (for creators, entrepreneurs, and activists), there is a key blindspot that we haven’t seen: all of this social sharing on these ‘free’ platforms came with the promise to investors that we would be monetized. Our data and our attention is being sold via our newsfeeds in very similar ways that it happened with TV and radio before it.
Tim Wu and Adi Kamdar have a really provocative perspective that they call “Peak Advertising”, which claims that banner ads are to publishers what fossil fuels are to the energy industry.
However, if history is any indicator, money will always find new ways to buy our attention, and the rise of native advertising and content marketing is an indicator that the ground is already shifting to accommodate the money.
Does anyone like Advertising? No.
The reality is that no one likes advertising, but those same people would prefer watching entertaining ads than paying to consume content. So despite the fact that nearly 37% of the internet (that >1 billion people) have download ad blocking software, big companies (and big politics) will continue to spend $100s of millions to interrupt and shape our culture unless we figure out another business model for media.
Unfortunately, our current prospects don’t look great. While the advertising industry continues to optimize and innovate to sneak their way into our attention in the least straight forward ways possible, our civic sector is largely clueless about the power of advertising (because they can’t afford it / aren’t funded to do it), our democracy is in deep debt to wealthy interests paying for their political campaigns, and the crowdfunding campaigns of our independent creators are now required to pay to even reach their own fans.
Am I wrong? Is there a silver lining that I’m not seeing? Is there a possilibity to create a culture where thoughtful ideas and independent culture and important stories spread beyond our existing silos and tribes?
