When I created my website years ago, I made a simple promise to everyone who ever visited it. That promise is on the About the Website page and it is about advertising and it simply states: No Advertising. I take that seriously, to the degree that I don’t promote anything in my blogs on purpose. Sometimes, I have to use the names of companies but they are not advertisements. Furthermore, I make it clear that I am footing the bill for this website and I own all of the content. Why would I not monetize (weaponize) my website and generate income from it?
Simple, I hate advertising on the web. Perhaps I am remembering the past with rose tinted glasses, but I think many of you would agree with me – the internet has gotten out of control. [There is a lot more below, click read more for my full analysis]
I remember a time, not long ago, when YouTube wasn’t owned by Google (October 9th, 2016 is when that changed). It was a weird time where YouTube had bugs and odd usability issues. There were competing sites like Stage6 where you could get High Definition video over a streaming connection before Netflix even existed. It was the future, now the future is here and it sucks. (Fun fact, at that time Yahoo! was still relevant and working on buying Facebook.)
Back on track, when Google bought YouTube they made a promise to find a way to advertise on the website. Originally, they knew people would never want to watch a fifteen second advertisement to watch a forty second clip – boy were they wrong – and promised to do advertisements tastefully (flyovers as the video plays). These advertisements were minimal, but they were promised in the press release to shareholders to validate the billion dollar plus purchase (this not an advertisement, but thank you Archive.org (it will let you see stuff that may have disappeared off the internet or was modified from the original release)). What was happening was simple, YouTube wasn’t the dominate power it is today, so turning off the customers with outrageous advertisements or subscriptions would have put it in a coffin. Google was smart, they knew that making their customer experience the pain of advertisements would destroy their user base.
This lack of advertisements was only possible at the time because there were so many competing brands. If YouTube upset us, we could go to Stage6 and use their system. Yet, as time went on, we became ingrained in certain technologies and our finger’s found themselves typing a URL before we even knew what was happening. Now, we have successfully pushed out any other solution for video on the web. Sure some exist, but there is no way to become a dominate player in the self made video market anymore since YouTube has fostered the ability for a no-name to make money based on views of their video. Why would I put my content on a competing product that doesn’t pay me? You wouldn’t, and as such, YouTube will forever be where we go for advert– fun videos. Even if another company sprung up and had a solid offering, we won’t know about it.
Now, this isn’t some magical thing Google pioneered. What Google realized was that they would never get money from users of their services if they charged a subscription fee since people could just go to AltaVista (name drop). Instead, they could get money from other corporations by mining your data and then using that data to serve you advertisements. Thus, you have a value to Google (320 dollars or so). That was their business model, and we quickly jumped to the free service with advertisements.
That was our mistake as a species. What we effectively did was migrate to all the free services that existed on the internet. We sent the newspaper industry into the toilet in record setting time (they had ads, but they were easy to pick out and ignore). We funded an entire industry on how to get people to click advertisements. We incentivized people to data mine so far up our collective asses that they are flicking our tonsils. What has that led to exactly? Unusable websites.
You know what I am talking about: Engine Falls off Airplane, Check it Out. We click that link, only to realize it was a fatal mistake. Our computer begins to whine as it processes tons of data, the browser window goes white, colorful graphics begin to load and dance on screen, then the headline comes into play, and a slide show appears with an advertisement – click next to get to the first paragraph of the story. If you are really unlucky, the website will load, yet, you find yourself unable to scroll down, not because of a code issue, but because a video file is popping up and playing. Your speakers blast someone’s voice and you scan the screen to find the annoyance (only to find that there is no way to stop it).
So like a war, we react. Advertisement blockers were first, and they promised us some solace. Now, the major ones will allow advertisements through if they fit certain standards. Even our defenses are being weaponized against us. So we move to disabling large portions of websites (disabling trackers and secondary plugins which allow owners of websites to weaponize their website without you having to develop new code). Yet, the website learns this and won’t let us read without disabling our newest defense. In the end, we flee from these corners of the web and jump back into the safe places where advertisements were embedded into the code from the get go (they load faster and don’t destroy your browser).
Even with all of these problems, something worse has happened. I can no longer perform a simple search without the best results being links to websites who sell something related to what I searched. The information of the world is on the internet, but we can’t get to it anymore. We have collectively weaponized the greatest achievement of humanity and we did it in under a decade.