| I don't want to seem like an old-timer telling the young whipersnappers soda pop used to be a nickel but I was involved in the internet before there was a web. So, I've sort of seen the growth over time and believe it or not there was a time before advertising. Most websites didn't have advertising. Nowadays your strange uncle has ads on his personal blog because someone told him about AdSense. Forget that fact that he earns $0.15 a year, he's a professional blogger. For awhile, most of the content on the internet was non-commercial. People, myself included, posted stuff online because we wanted to share information. We had no expectation of ever receiving compensation for it. Nowadays way too many people want to thumb their nose at boring jobs and travel the world writing blog posts and getting paid for it. Or they want to become Instagram stars so they pimp products for money. I'm not saying that as a cranky old man. What I'm getting at is everybody is trying to monetize everybody else. It's not that you get annoying ads on CNN, it's that your cousin is trying to get you to watch his YouTube channel so he can quit the rat race and live in Thailand for $500 a month. I know this is unrealistic but I would like to see things move back more towards how they used to be. Ad platforms used to actually have standards. You had to be doing pretty decent traffic to even be considered. The bar was set high enough that it limited the number of people who created websites as commercial ventures. People used to create websites because they were passionate about a topic, not because they figured out that there was an SEO niche where they could rank #1 for a keyword and then slap ads all over the site. And the way this relates back to services that could not exist otherwise, if they're valuable enough people will either pay to use them or advertisers will bid up the price for the limited advertising inventory and the provider can make a decent return. Because the real problem is that the supply of content is virtually infinite while the money going into the advertising space is finite. Thus, supply of space to advertise exceeds demand willing to pay to advertise on it. |