Archived version: https://archive.ph/hh0wg
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20231030213952/https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67226394
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Makes me wonder what the internet would be like if we hadn’t gone down the “free” ad rabbit hole.
Costco makes almost all their profit from their membership fees. They pay and treat their employees well compared to others. People enjoy shopping there (well as long as they don’t go at crazy busy times…) they’ve successfully done things the non evil way.
That model with Google, they wouldn’t care to put us in a bubble with bubbled ads. They’d actually focus on making good search instead of its steady decline as they try to put ads in our face.
YouTube wouldn’t need to worry about their algorithm the same way as they wouldn’t need to drive engagement to show more ads.
Facebook wouldn’t be performing literally harmful psychological experiments on their users to drive engagement to drive more ad revenue.
Maybe none of it would ever have taken off without the ads, but think of how different it could be if they didn’t need to do any of the shitty things they do to drive more ads, and we just paid for services that are useful and we enjoy
That’s what capitalism requires, though, so it was unavoidable. All the tech companies run on venture capital without generating any profit in hopes of either capturing enough market share to become a monopoly or getting bought out.
Does it really though, or is that just the easy way out?
Dota 2 is free to play, no ads, they make money selling cosmetic items and battle passes.
World of warcraft had millions of players each paying a monthly fee.
People buy upgrades on apps to enable advanced features
People pay for dating apps
With the amount of time people spend on Facebook I can totally see there being multiple levels of subscriptions.
Edit: and the services would be much less shitty by not having to deal with ads, which would make people happier and more willing to spend.
I would say it is.
Just take a look at gaming from a far. Almost 50% of studios are partially or fully owned by one company - Tencent. Then you have a few smaller scale monopolies that focus on their own niches. Microsoft with their major consolidation happening right now and merging PC and console, SONY with their consoles and Nintendo with their handheld exclusives.
App stores are monopolies themselves. If you want to get those sales, you have to fit in the frame mandated to you by either Google or Apple.
People use dating apps? Can’t comment here, not familiar with it.
There is no paid platform that has even a fraction of users that a free platform does. And that’s by design, because once you have a user base you can always monetize it in 100 different ways and get 100x revenue over time than slowly building users that need to pay to try your platform.
Well I guess I should say I don’t disagree about the monopoly part. That’s definitely a thing with capitalism, but thats also the system failing us as they should be being prevented. You could also say it being broken and failing us is a feature of capitalism, but I’d probably disagree on that one.
It’s absurd that they let Microsoft buy Activision-Blizzard, but it’s going to keep happening.
I don’t know if you watch Upload, but they nailed it with “Oscar Mayer intel”
But I don’t think ads are specifically related to the monopoly problem. It’s a thing, ads, or no ads.
