Everything was open season in the 1700s. You could do what you want, go where you want, take what you, without say or regulation.
Whalers — the most salted of humanity, would bring everything they needed, their supplies, tools and livestock. The Galapagos islands became a basecamp, a waypoint for touch down on solid ground for the whalers, before venturing back to sea. A staple for these gruff, veterans of the Pacific were goats. Goats provided meat, milk and cheese and were stalwarts of the barnyard and perfect for oceanic travels.
Soon, thousands of goats ran amok, ravaging the Islands and destroying the very essence of what made the islands special. The goats pillaged the vegetation and multiplied until soon people began to take notice. Unfortunately, for the goats, the attention they gathered resulted in eradication plans and soon plans were undertaken to restore the natural balance of The Galapagos.
The internet, like the Galapagos. A beautiful, digital oasis has run been over run by goats. These goats come in many forms. Some are banners, some are sponsored content, some are CPC, PPC, Behavioral Targeting, Contextual Advertising, Social Media Marketing, Tracking ads, DCM, Facebook Pixel, and heinous and insidious Terms and Services, coated with a thick layer of denial and ‘to good to be true free services’. Fucking goats.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, the eradication phase has already begun and now, it’s in full swing. The first wave began in 2006, Adblock was created and offered consumers their first line of defense against the invasive species. But, like any arms race, the advertising world stuck back, paying AdBlock millions of dollars to whitelist certain websites and ads. As it progressed, new ad blocking software came out and now, browsers no long require plugins to block ads.
Brave new world
Brave is a newer browser that not only blocks ads, but it natively blocks ad trackers and fingerprinting tracking. In addition the browser promises faster load times while upgrading your http sites to a more secure protocol, https.
The new weapons are welcome, but the real issue is what do we do with this infected system we’ve built? In some instances, eradicating goats off of the Galapagos islands is arguably a far easier task than fixing the entwined and suffocating internet from advertising and tracking.
The fabric of the internet has been irreversibly changed with the integration of advertising, and to be honest, I don’t think anyone saw this coming. At first, what seemed to be a easy way to offer people content without having them pay for it has created an unappreciated, unsustainable model with the perceived value for the end-user falling just short of the ‘I’d definitely pay money for this’ threshold.
In other words, we’ve conditioned consumers, online, to expect everything for nothing.
And instead of trying to fix this problem from the ground up(which would require an entire paradigm shift, and quite frankly, might be too late) there has been a widely adopted “strategic” move to freemium modeling and the pillaging of consumer’s data without their knowledge—burying the acknowledgment of selling consumer data in the terms and conditions doesn’t count as informing the consumer.
We’ve habitually and conditionally accepted that everything on the internet is of no value. We baulk at the idea of paying for articles, sneer at paywalls and continue to block ads. So where do we go from here?
Assume that your data is an acceptable exchange of value? But what happens when more people use VPNs and install browsers like Brave that make the collected data less valuable? What then? Do you pivot and allow companies to use your computer to mine for cryptocurrencies as a revenue model?
I don’t know. I do know that only 9% of ads are being viewed for more than one second.
That’s absurd. I’ve been using the Brave browser for exactly one week. In that one week, Brave(with no extensions installed) has blocked nearly 4,000 trackers, over 1,400 ads, upgraded my browsing to https 2,100 times and shaved nearly 5 minutes off of my load times.
Google even rolled out automatic ad blocking in it’s newest update to Chrome. Albeit, not as pervasive as Brave–Google, the company that pulled in $15.5 BILLION dollars from ad revenue in 2016 is blocking ads now.
Welcome to the high water mark, my friend.
Mining cryptocurrencies in exchange for content access seems like an interesting model, but it’s not a long term strategy. Anyone following the move to PoS knows that the PoW model for cryptocurrencies is already targeted with planned obsolescence. The future is simple. Consumers begin to pay. They choose to pay with their data, they pay with their attention, or they pay with a currency. Free won’t last, and neither will a lot of websites that people decide aren’t worth paying for.
