The End of Internet advertising?

There’s an interesting shift going on in the online world right now.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both Tumblr and Twitter are both rolling out ways for people to monetize posts around the same time.

No one is saying it out loud yet, but there’s a growing realization that the advertising model propping up the web is failing.

From its inception, there was a tension in the purpose of the web. Those that built the early web wanted it to be free. It was to be a utility of communication and information. Entire sums of human knowledge available to anyone and everyone.

However, running the servers cost money. The answer chosen for this was advertising space. Simply giving up portions of the page to banner ads. At the time, this seemed like a fairly innocent and safe compromise.

I doubt most people selling add space on their pages would even be able to conceive of the kind of surveillance capitalism it would birth.

The arms race

Humans are actually very good at resisting advertising if given time. The human brain will, over time, get good at filtering out stimuli and learning how to zero in on only relevant information.

This is why there are trends in advertising methods. Old strategies stop working, and new methods are needed to maintain people’s attention.

In the case of the internet, originally it was banner adds along the top or sides of pages. People began to become blind to them and new to ignore those areas of a layout.

This drove a shift to popup adds. The idea being to force people to look at the adds.

Of course, people began to learn to immediately click the dismiss button without taking in the ad.

This drove more intrusive and harder to dismiss designs.

These days, ad blockers are a necessity when browsing the internet.

The return of sponsorship as advertising came about largely because that carries the double whammy of not being blockable, but also means your parasocial relationship with the creators can be leveraged to put trust in the products bring pushed.

Time to pay

For the longest time, it was believed the advertising model was the only viable funding method. People had the expectation that if it was on the internet, then it should be free.

What really broke this was Patreon. News sites had used paywalls before, but the general consensus that content should be paid for really started to shift with Patreon.

There was a resistance to this idea at first. Often the video creators and artists that pushed their Patreon subscriptions were derided as “e-beggers”.

However, over Time the idea of paying for extra content or access became normalised. I also feel like there is now a greater understanding of the amount of labour creators need to do to make their works.

So after years of advertising being the only game in town direct subscriptions became a viable, and for creators, a much more stable way to pay.

This is where we get to the modern day, where social media sites are gearing up to pivot to becoming subscription providers.

Twitter has experimented with paid entries to their audio conferencing ‘spaces’ and there are rumours of posts limited to paying followers.

Tumblr, for what diminishing slice of the social media pie it has, is also trialling paid-for posts to blog following.

Ultimately, these are attempts to try and escape the advertising model and become the next platform of choice for creators.

The good and the bad

Obviously, the immediate good is the reduction of waiding through adverts on social media. No more will you have to scroll past a million advertising posts before reaching photos of your friend’s holiday.

It also means less of a reliance on tracking our movements online. There will be less of an incentive to collect and collate user data. I am actually sceptical if this will actually mean the end of online tracking. Beyond advertising, there are other entities that will pay for information allowing them to track and model people’s behaviour.

I have no doubt big tech firms will double-dip and have users paying for using their service with both currency and information. However, with no immediate excuse, it will become harder for companies to justify tracking. This could lead to more pressure to reduce online tracking through legal and political means in the long run.

The downside is subscription fatigue. We live in an age where everything wants to be an ongoing subscription model. Want to own software? Maybe buy photoshop or a word processor program? Ha! Good luck. You have to pay a monthly tithe to temporarily rent what you could have in the past owned.

So how many subscriptions are you willing to get? When you’re already paying for video streaming, work software and games, would you really also be willing to pay for someone’s tweets?

There is also who has the money to pay. The internet became so ubiquitous because all the major services on it was free at the point of use. It was a great equalizer. It’s what allows anyone of all backgrounds to have an equal say and for their voices to be heard.

We have seen greater change than ever before because socially deprived groups on the margins now have a way to project their voice and spread their story after centuries of media excluding them.

If everything becomes paywalled, suddenly those with no money again will have no voice, and we will be back to everything centring the affluent white middle-class world-view unchallenged.

The Voluntary Model

A possible alternative model is the voluntary model. I encounter this in my online spheres a lot. For my mastodon profile, I give a few pound to the server each month for running costs. I don’t get any benefits from this beyond the server I like and enjoy keeps running for not just me but everyone.

The same with the music I buy through Bandcamp. Much of it is Pay-What-you want with a recommended price. When money has been bad, I’ve just paid what I was able, and when money has been good, I’ve paid the asking price.

Wikipedia funds itself through donation drives, and many a time I have given the asking price because I find it an invaluable cornerstone of the internet.

And when I have needed it, I have put voluntary donation links on my blog and people have given me donations which meant the world to me.

This obviously has limitations. Larger entities would struggle to maintain this. Indeed, the voluntary funding model kind of relies on a sense of intimacy and understanding small groups are better at instilling in people. I don’t think this is entirely a bad thing.

I do believe a more distributed Internet, made up of small federations rather than large sites, would be far better. Oh. it would have issues and be far from perfect, but still a much better one than it is now.

People with the broadest backs should carry the most load so that everyone may take part.

Originally published at https://solarpunkdruid.com on September 27, 2021.