[rglullis]

The problem is not ads, the problem is with Ad Tech. The tracking, user data collection and exploitation in secondary markets. There are ethical ways to have a business that uses ads a source of income and does not require "ad tech".

This is one of the reasons that I like the Brave/BAT model so much. It shows that you can have an "ad-based" economy without having to have Surveillance Capitalism. People could take part of the rewards they receive from the ad network and use to pay for their social media service. That was one of my ideas behind communick. [0]

And anyway, even if we wanted to get rid of "ads" altogether: WhatsApp was a profitable, sustainable business just by charging $1/year from part of its userbase. Facebook bought them because they knew it could become a threat to their business model.

[0] https://communick.com

[elvischidera]

Thanks!

It's questionable, but I think the idea is that ad tech makes ads more valuable? Ie a user gets something relevant to them.

Maybe the future will be this personalization happens offline on the user's device.

Your example on WhatsApp buttresses my point I guess. With payment, businesses have to rely on part of their userbase. And we all know that segment largely comes from particular geographies. This knowledge largely affects a company's strategy.

Ads are not totally different -- CPC/CPM varies across markets. But maybe can be compensated by volume.

[rglullis]

> I think the idea is that ad tech makes ads more valuable?

This is what they want us to believe. I am pretty sure that in some years we will look at this claims from ad tech in the way that we see today the mid-century claims from Big Tobacco about the benefits of smoking.

> Maybe the future will be this personalization happens offline on the user's device.

It's already part of the present. This is exactly how Brave does the ad-matching. To make it perfect the only thing that I think is missing is for the user to have a way to train their own matching model, or at least to provide some kind of feedback about the types of ads that are relevant to them.

> And we all know that segment largely comes from particular geographies.

I believe that most companies already operate on the assumption that they will provide the service globally and lower-income markets are subsidized by richer regions. That is certainly true for any product that depends on network effects.

And for the products that do not depend on network effects, then the segmentation is likely to be a good thing. A more diverse set of companies, trying to solve the specific problems of different markets - instead of pushing for one-size-fits-all plans from big Corporations - is good thing in my book.