Friday, August 12, 2016

Ad-supported media should never have worked in the first place

There's been a lot of media talk recently about how declining advertising revenues put various media outlets and websites at risk and how websites especially are taking extraordinary efforts to get ads in front of people who don't want to see them.

And in all of this, it occurs to me: it's bizarre that ad-supported media has lasted this long in the first place!

I can see why a business might consider spending a certain amount of money to make potential customers aware of it. And I can see why a media outlet might consider offering paid placements.

But it doesn't even make sense that businesses would be willing to spend so much on advertising that it supports the existence of entire media outlets, to the point of being their primary or only source of revenue!

Think about all the ads you're exposed to in a day. How many do you even notice?  (If you're like me, you're not even looking at the parts of the newspaper pages where they put the ads, or going to the bathroom during commercial breaks.) Of these, how many do you pay attention do? Of these, how many affect your purchasing decisions? Maybe a handful over a lifetime, compared with the dozens (hundreds?) you're exposed to every day.

How is that worth businesses' while to pay for?

The decline of the advertising model is a market correction. Something that never made sense in the first place is ceasing to function. Yes, it's inconvenient, but it was inevitable, long before the dawn of the internet or of ad blockers.

1 comment:

Lorraine said...

I've become quite convinced that click-throughs, conversions and eventual sales are not what makes advertising part of the business model, at least of the web, and in some cases, also traditional media. I believe that present-day spam (i.e. advertising) is literally a value-subtracted feature. To subtract a negative number is to add a positive number, so if an app, website, or something else offers a value proposition that literally consists of nothing other than an ad-free version of what is otherwise the same "experience," in exchange for cash money, then we have an empirical example of the business model of at least some advertising being 100% about value subtraction and 0% about product promotion. In theory, maybe they make some sales on the side. But it would seem most businesses/brands would lose more in the long run (by its reputation being associated with particularly spammy ad tactics) than it would gain in the short run by spam-ad-generated sales, if any. So a more realistic breakdown might be 110% value subtraction and -10% product promotion.

I find it necessary to note that there seems to be a qualitative difference between internet advertising and non-internet advertising in general. In non-internet venues, there's a respectability spectrum of advertising from highly creative, intelligent and tasteful (right tail of the bell shaped curve) to highly sleazy, manipulative and dubious (left tale). Some would mention Super Bowl commercials as the right tail of advertising in the television medium, although the seemingly obligatory injection of frat-boy humor into virtually all sports advertising leads me to put in that category the kind of mainstream consumer product ads found in first run prime time TV series, specifically the ones that are either ratings champs and/or Emmy® prospects. But even the Super Bowl ads, while not entirely tasteful, can be described as "high concept." Indeed, those advertisers gunning for a Clio& award are probably the only ones in the thin part of the right tail of the distribution. The lower tail is infomercials in the television media, and maybe back-of-the magazine ads in print media. The defining elements are a too-good-to-be-true value proposition, combined with a psychological approach that focuses on pressing the audience's inadequacy buttons hard. And of course in radio and television, voice-overs with exaggeratedly "carnival barker" mannerisms. Thing is, the left tail seems to be the only part of the highly diverse body of advertising industry output that manages to seep into the Internet. There are a few exceptions. For example, I find the right panel ad in Yahoo! Mail more often or not to contain a straightforward ad for a straightforward product such as a laundry detergent or a car. Once I even saw a clever and creative PSA about birth control education. In French (which is the default language in my Yahoo! profile). Seemingly in violation of the left-tail-only law outlined above. But there also seems to be a Law of Conservation of Taste at work too. The intensity of the clickbait chum in Yahoo! News would make Facebook blush.