At some point the cost of advertising to the medium in terms of user disengagement will exceed the income. I can't wait for it to happen, then at least we will reach some kind of steady-state.
I really pity the newspapers, especially the ones that also have an online presence, they are caught between a rock and a hard place and no matter what they do they end up hurting themselves, their employers, users or shareholders. It's very hard to transition from a 1800's model to one that will work 200 years later.
Bandwidth being as cheap as it is means that advertisers really don't care about how many bytes they need to shove down the pipe in order to make a sale. End users on metered bandwidth (mobile for instance) will suffer but that's not the advertisers problem, to them it is mission accomplished and the website owner/publisher will end up holding the bag.
I find it pretty ironic that Google constantly tries to optimize for every byte in some of its products, pushes for speed and mobile optimization, yet ends up completely negating that in its advertising offerings.
This and the malware that gets through. Stop allowing arbitrary Javascript in ads, and that's it - problem solved. But nope, the cat and mouse chase goes on, and maldvertisers are always a step ahead.
"End users on metered bandwidth (mobile for instance) will suffer but that's not the advertisers problem"
Well, it is their problem or else we wouldn't have this "crisis" of Internet ads now and cries of advertisers/publishers. After all, you can only push a limited amount of bullshit down the users throat before they start throwing up.. It took many years of abuse by countless browser bars, pop-up ads, auto play videos, inflated network bills for a casual user to start using ad-blockers.
I wonder too if there are some good data on user disengagement. Lately there seems to be a spike of autoplay videos in the sites I visit frequently. I just immediately hit the Back button as my silent "protest", but I can't help feeling stupid, like I'm the only human being that doesn't seem to enjoy loud videos running in the background.
Where do these media companies get their data from? Data that says autoplay videos create more engagement or revenue or something that can make up for people, like me, just running away? The other day Fortune magazine surprised me with that same thing, and the video wasn't even related to what the article was about. Does it come from Facebook's success with _silent_ autoplay? These are not rhetoric questions, I'm really curious to understand the logic behind this.
I really pity the newspapers, especially the ones that also have an online presence, they are caught between a rock and a hard place and no matter what they do they end up hurting themselves, their employers, users or shareholders. It's very hard to transition from a 1800's model to one that will work 200 years later.
Bandwidth being as cheap as it is means that advertisers really don't care about how many bytes they need to shove down the pipe in order to make a sale. End users on metered bandwidth (mobile for instance) will suffer but that's not the advertisers problem, to them it is mission accomplished and the website owner/publisher will end up holding the bag.