• she/her

Principal investigator at an undeserving midwestern university. I am ill-tempered and well-endowed. Beware.


I have a Cohost for art and writing!
cohost.org/lab-reports
profile pic by Xīn Jīn Mèng!
cohost.org/xinjinmeng

QuestForTori
@QuestForTori

Major platforms are starting to realize that people don’t have money to pay for tons of services anymore and the only thing that’s making money is selling customer data to someone else to try and sell THEIR service. That, and a shitload of investor cash to keep the ship afloat with the promise of eventual profitability sometime maybe decades down the line.

But like ships passing in the night, many platforms that relied mainly on that ad revenue are also not happy with the returns they’re making and are making desperate moves to get the last drops of blood out of the turnip that is their user base. You see how this is a problem, right? Even if the whole internet is selling your data, passing it back and forth between companies indefinitely, at some point it should have to result in a sale to be useful.

The online ad industry feels like it’s being sustained by a shared fiction of profitability and spinning the numbers such that you only have to worry about selling to the next fool in the chain. It feels like the whole revenue model of the internet is a house of cards that’ll crumble after a few big reports on its actual profitability, and as soon as faith starts to waver, it’ll just be over.

I’m no economist or anything, so I'm probably talking out of my ass about the details of this situation, but even I see the problem with literally everyone in an industry trying to sell the same product amongst themselves, without any profitable base in actually selling a thing to the consumer.

You can tell these ships are sinking from the increasingly drastic, desperate moves they keep making that make no sense for trying to build a sustainable platform, but make more sense if you're trying to manipulate stock prices, hopefully sell everything so your loss-cutting won't hurt quite as bad, and pass that hot potato one last time before everything crumbles. It'll be wild to see that collapse happen on an industry-wide scale.


fineursine
@fineursine

In no particular order: the EU's GDPR and data protection laws, iOS limiting tracking by default, the failed pivot to video and economic recession have all made ads less useful.

Plus, we are advertised to everywhere now. Remember when movies had a concessions commercial and then trailers and then a film? Commercials before the show can last longer than previews now.


doctorwednesday
@doctorwednesday

(reads article) "Well, clearly what we need here is a campaign to convince consumers that a need for food and shelter represents a deep moral failing and also makes them sexually unattractive. I think we're on to a winner."


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @QuestForTori's post:

if nothing else we are reaching a saturation point, i think; trying to use the internet without an adblock will subject you to ads constantly, often multiple times in a single page, often video, and i cannot possibly fathom they aren't seeing diminishing returns on that. how can you claim to even get eyeballs when your ad is competing against the other 4 visible ads?

as it is it really feels like the pyramid scheme of it all is only getting more and more apparent. websites that make money by selling banner ads for websites that make their money by selling banner ads for websites that make their money by selling ads for

meanwhile on twitter, I get ads for like, the NBA, which are auto-playing videos that start with preroll ads for something unrelated, and the goal of the NBA ad itself is of course to get you to follow or subscribe via cable to show, you guessed it, more ads

I have despised advertisement since I was a child, just wise enough to recognize what it was and what purpose it served - to invade the brain with nonsense aimed at programing a consumptive loop into our thinking, and constrain us into believing we have problems that we don't, and to believe that all problems are solved by Products which must be Purchased from the Advertisers.

I can't wait to watch this whole thing burn. This entire evil complex has nowhere to go but Hell.

gods im just... really glad to hear these exact thoughts, independently, from other familiar names on the internet

it always feels like an uphill battle to have to argue that i never agreed to sell my attention, the entire world just decided it was free game to take it

or to explain to people who haven't escaped the advertosphere just how uncomfortably manipulative it feels when something slips through the cracks and you've gotta sit through it to continue

And a lot of this was sustained by years and years of low interest rates that caused people to pour money into the system (and many others that otherwise have no clear means of immediate profit) because they needed to put it somewhere for a chance of decent returns. But rates have been climbing since early 2022 to curb inflation, to the point where they're at the highest they've been in 15 years, and it's become clear that they're not going back down again any time soon. I think that's actually the main reason we're seeing panic now.