CDN and cybersecurity giant Cloudflare held its Q2 earnings call on Thursday, during which chief financial officer Thomas Seifert gave a concerning prediction about what the web...
Last year, you’d be correct. This year, bots DO purchase things. They also download and run things. Some marketers have gotten wise and have adjusted SEO and general product advertising to appeal to bots.
A lot of sites wouldn’t exist without ads, because they want their stuff to be freely-accessible and don’t have any other revenue streams. It would also cut off lower income people that couldn’t afford to pay.
The only business models that have really worked online have been:
Ad-supported.
You pay for the service yourself, like a monthly subscription.
Someone else pays for the service for you, for example freemium services (paid users subsidize the free users), a lot of Lemmy servers (admins cover the hosting costs), etc.
If ads go away, a lot of sites/services would have to become paid services, and smaller ones might just shut down entirely. We’d end up with even more consolidation of the market.
We could live without anything that uses ads to “sustain” itself. Nobody hosting ads on their service is doing so to “maintain” themselves. They just want profit for their labour… they are entitled too, but its a business choice, never a necessity.
And yeah if I use something, I’ll always pay for no ads. Ads cost so much more of our lifespans and contribute so fucking little to those that host them. Garbage.
cut off lower income people that couldn’t afford to pay.
There’s a shot of irony in there… Google doesn’t monetize poor people highly at all, but the poor people get “free” access with ads because some richer people also allow themselves to see the ads. What kind of communism is that?
It’s the same way that taxes work. Rich people contribute more than poorer people, but everyone can use things funded by public money (parks, police, fire fighters, public transport, schools, health care outside the USA, etc).
I actually wonder if there should be more taxpayer-funded online services. Lemmy’s development was partially funded by government money (NLNet Foundation via the European Commission) for example.
Yeah, my shareware did real well - 800 hours in development, $500 in income across the past 30 years. Oh, and it cost me $400 for the compiler tools back then - so my net profit is rolling in at $0.12 per hour invested. Warning: $440 of that $500 came from an extreme niche product you’re unlikely to find such a lucrative vein anymore. My game only netted $60 in return for 400 hours of development, but you could say I got the compiler “for free” off that niche product’s income.
I don’t particularly think it’s a better change, but CloudFlare is thinking of other options, and with how widespread their use is, if they start doing it, so will everyone else:
awesome, then we can remove all the ads, no? because bots don’t purchase things, no?
Last year, you’d be correct. This year, bots DO purchase things. They also download and run things. Some marketers have gotten wise and have adjusted SEO and general product advertising to appeal to bots.
Where did we go wrong?
In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. – Some Hoopy Frood
Has anyone tried moving around little green bits of paper? Or no because on the whole it isn’t the little green bits of paper that are unhappy?
Some would say it was coming down from the trees.
We gave normies access to the internet at anytime.
Once upon a time, a bunch of primates came down from the trees and now we have unstoppable climate change.
Thanks aliens
We let people become rich without eating them when they did bad things.
Everyday we do not stop the profit incentive.
For whom are they purchasing things?
A lot of sites wouldn’t exist without ads, because they want their stuff to be freely-accessible and don’t have any other revenue streams. It would also cut off lower income people that couldn’t afford to pay.
The only business models that have really worked online have been:
If ads go away, a lot of sites/services would have to become paid services, and smaller ones might just shut down entirely. We’d end up with even more consolidation of the market.
We could live without anything that uses ads to “sustain” itself. Nobody hosting ads on their service is doing so to “maintain” themselves. They just want profit for their labour… they are entitled too, but its a business choice, never a necessity.
And yeah if I use something, I’ll always pay for no ads. Ads cost so much more of our lifespans and contribute so fucking little to those that host them. Garbage.
I respect your take, but I think it is wrong.
There’s a shot of irony in there… Google doesn’t monetize poor people highly at all, but the poor people get “free” access with ads because some richer people also allow themselves to see the ads. What kind of communism is that?
It’s the same way that taxes work. Rich people contribute more than poorer people, but everyone can use things funded by public money (parks, police, fire fighters, public transport, schools, health care outside the USA, etc).
I actually wonder if there should be more taxpayer-funded online services. Lemmy’s development was partially funded by government money (NLNet Foundation via the European Commission) for example.
I think donation/investment based freemium is the future of internet content once the bots kill ad viability
I’ve tried that before, but barely anyone donates. People expect the world for free.
Yeah, my shareware did real well - 800 hours in development, $500 in income across the past 30 years. Oh, and it cost me $400 for the compiler tools back then - so my net profit is rolling in at $0.12 per hour invested. Warning: $440 of that $500 came from an extreme niche product you’re unlikely to find such a lucrative vein anymore. My game only netted $60 in return for 400 hours of development, but you could say I got the compiler “for free” off that niche product’s income.
I don’t particularly think it’s a better change, but CloudFlare is thinking of other options, and with how widespread their use is, if they start doing it, so will everyone else:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/monetization-gateway/
Advertisers might find a way to sneak ads into prompt injections or something