Ads were once sold in the same way as newspapers did: you received a call from someone interested in purchasing a banner ad on your website. In the early 2000s, Google created AdWords to provide people with the tools they needed to leverage data about what people were searching for. This concept generated a fortune for Google akin to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and then went on to establish the financial engine that powers the modern internet.
Advertising was one of the first business models that individuals considered. Google had previously estimated that adverts would account for only 15% of their revenue, with the majority of their revenue coming from corporate clients licensing its search engine. It’s ironic because their search algorithm was the forerunner of programmatic advertising. Everything now is based on advertisements.
According to an article by BBC science focus; Advertising works, but the effect is so limited and weak that you have to do these astronomically expensive trials to see if it makes a difference. Procter & Gamble, one of the world’s largest advertisers, chose to eliminate $200 million from its digital ad budget a few years ago. The result was that nothing changed – they sold the same amount – raising the question of what the $200 million was spent on.
At some point, the bubble will burst. Every previous market bubble has had the same underlying phenomenon: the fundamental worth of attention acquired by advertising is falling. We’ve been able to push some difficult questions down the road thanks to advertising.
Whether you believe in technology or not, you must believe in its efficacy, and many of our critiques of technology give this myth a strength it does not have.
We’ll see more new business ideas if the internet isn’t reliant on advertising. Some will help content creators, while others will help businesses. Perhaps some of them will be beneficial to the general population. It will alter the internet’s nature, which will take some getting used to.
