What’s weird for me is that users can effectively vote with their wallets - they can refuse to engage with ‘freemium’ or ad-supported media - and they can refuse to consume ads when presented, refuse to engage with calls to action, refuse to pay for products advertised to them in this way.
Have you ever been shown a mobile ad, and thought to yourself, “this is a good thing, this is an honest description of a product that I am eager to spend money on?” No, on the contrary, they’re the subject of universal ridicule… and yet they persist. Why? How? Who is paying for them? How are they generating revenue? How can that be worth anything? Where is the value coming from?
So even though I delete apps that force you to sit through ads, and I refuse to be led by ads towards spending money - even though I am in effect ‘voting’ by doing so - it doesn’t seem to have any impact. The ads keep happening anyway, I can only assume because they do actually work on other less canny consumers.
Is the problem really an inability to vote with our wallets? Or is the problem a complete lack of media/marketing literacy, that leads the credulous to engage with ad slop, against their own best interests?
Some of it is more specific to social media, where it is a vicious circle. I wouldn’t latch to voting with your wallet, it’s merely one symptom of a complex issue.
For social it’s key to communicate with others, so as long as you use it you kind of have to be where everybody is, and everybody is where the free stuff is. If you can’t easily leave and continue communicating, because the platform attracts advertisers by the number of figurative eyeballs so it’s not in their interest to let yours go, then you can’t vote with your wallet unless you make yourself an outcast, which humans—extremely social beings—tend to find extremely stressful, which makes it is not really in their best interest no matter their media and marketing literacy.
On the other hand, even if you do make this difficult near-suicide move and leave, you have hardly anywhere to go: because of this phenomenon, any honest competition where you can pay for better service that works in your interest and has actual customer support (remember when that was a thing?) has no chance. All viable competition remains mostly free to use—we have been conditioned that it’s got to be free, but of course if neither users nor advertisers are paying then no one can really demand things that we take for granted from commercial services (like uptime, availability, well-supported convenient clients and so on), and the amount of resources that goes into development and support of these services is much smaller and much less coordinated.
With non-social ad-supported products it’s not as bad, at least in terms of lock-in. I personally would prefer a paid app from a somewhat reputable developer than risk installing a tracking machine from a shady SDK. However, still, most people default to free, and if platform fee is reduced and that honest app costs slightly less but is still not free, will it make any perceptible difference? I doubt it (maybe you’re right, most people lack media/marketing literacy, they can see that with free their economic utility per dollar approaches infinity and are unaware or not concerned about the intangible damage, including to the ecosystem of developers who try to make an honest living) and so I think ad/data mining based model should be fought on another level.
I think if there ever was an indicator that some function should be owned by the public, it’s when the public has come to expect it exists for free, when the social expectation is this thing is so fundamental and necessary that paying for it is absurd and creates equity of access problems.
An issue with regulation of something as public good is stagnation. When companies can make money and compete for serving the customer best, this drives innovation.
I used to think that a good alternative could be making it mandatory to provide feature-complete API for interoperation. Third-party cross-platform clients would remove lock-in and make ads unprofitable, demoting Big Social from platforms to pipes, like mobile providers, and force them to charge for service. It would no longer be in their interest to serve aggravating content to keep us glued to screens if we can just switch to a more mental health friendly competitor, and besides it would lower their server load.
However, I am not sure anymore whether it would do much to other shady practices like all sorts of data mining and sale, including the new practice of using private data for training commercial ML models.
>Is the problem really an inability to vote with our wallets? Or is the problem a complete lack of media/marketing literacy, that leads the credulous to engage with ad slop, against their own best interests?
The problem is companies/marketers who won't take no for an answer... And unfortunately, short of reverse monetization, (marketers must pay individuals for our eyeballs, which has its own logistical problems), there isn't a way to really prevent the pathological impression pipeline that advertising has gravitated toward. In the U.S. unfortunately, there is zero we can do to corral mercantile speech short of collectively coordinated action by the populace since we've written the capability out of our governmental edifice.
Have you ever been shown a mobile ad, and thought to yourself, “this is a good thing, this is an honest description of a product that I am eager to spend money on?” No, on the contrary, they’re the subject of universal ridicule… and yet they persist. Why? How? Who is paying for them? How are they generating revenue? How can that be worth anything? Where is the value coming from?
So even though I delete apps that force you to sit through ads, and I refuse to be led by ads towards spending money - even though I am in effect ‘voting’ by doing so - it doesn’t seem to have any impact. The ads keep happening anyway, I can only assume because they do actually work on other less canny consumers.
Is the problem really an inability to vote with our wallets? Or is the problem a complete lack of media/marketing literacy, that leads the credulous to engage with ad slop, against their own best interests?