Can I Be Frank?

March 26, 2008

I don’t get the Web 2.0 business model.

Does one even exist? Yeah, I know that it’s traffic = ad dollars, but isn’t most advertising annoying and ineffective in the first place? So everyone is trying to create sites, or communities, that get traffic so they can sell ads. And if you happen to have “morals” then I guess you don’t bombard your users with ads. But then how do you make money? Oh yeah, by selling out to a big company that can then bombard users with ads.

The whole model seems like some sort of circular reasoning, twilight zone, whirlpool of madness. Take Facebook for example. They recently launched their “social / targeted ads” feed that shows up in my news feed every time I log in. The ads appear very subtle and have the same look as the other notifications I see from my friends activities. But the visual trickery has not worked on me yet. I haven’t clicked a single one. Maybe it’s because if I wanted to go to CareerBuilder.com I would actually go there of my own free will, not because they delivered some lame ad that looked like it was actually a feed from my friends.

I hate this. And think that I always will. I mean, is there any other aspect of life that we go somewhere to be advertised to? The radio? TV? I guess that’s the nature of “free” services. Somebody’s got to pay for it. But isn’t that why XM radio and TIVO were invented? Because people hate advertising and they’re willing to pay a small premium to avoid it? I can’t wait for the day that the Internet starts to get this model.

Until then I’ll continue to loathe poorly executed bait and switch ad schemes and bemoan their existence to the poor souls who read this personal rag of mine.

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