this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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I remembered a scene of a black mirror episode: if the person looked away the ads will stop until the person watch it again and it's unavoidable ... I wonder if this will be a reality one day
Yes, the technology to do this is here, and they're just waiting for the consumer to be able to put up with it.
They know if they do that people will just disable their cameras or put tape over it like they already do. If they make it so you can't disable the camera without losing functionality then people won't buy the product.
If they try to push it by making a gentleman's agreement with their competitors to make all tvs or phones use camera eye contact during ads well have to have fight back with more ad blockers and such.
I mean the concept is pretty simple, all they have to do is make whatever the content it is not play without the verification.
Now I do have to say, it does come down to what is the system we do want? We can agree we don't want intrusive ads. We can say that the paid for services are too expensive. But at the end of the day when we refuse to pay for the content, and then bypass the ads, we do leave content creation in a rough spot. We've kind of reached a point where we need a new system. Yet all we seem to do is try and find ways to break the existing one.
The problem is that ad revenue brings in more money than subscription models ever can. So they're either super expensive because the company is accustomed to the high profits of ads, OR they inevitably end up slipping ads into the paids versions too.
Youtube has become this venus fly trap where content creators get exploited. They exist on the site solely to draw in viewers to show ads to. YouTube doesn't really care about the content or their creators(they don't care about paying them either since there's endless accounts) their primary function is to sell ads. That's it.
With data harvesting and personalized ads they basically print money for themselves. Now each ad spot will show something different to each person, meaning they are getting paid by multiple(potentially hundreds or thousands) of companies for each available ad location. They don't care if you buy the product because they got paid the second that ad popped up on your screen.
Ad based revenue is creating a huge fucking mess for everyone.
Honestly I disagree... From what I've heard from app developers etc... ads generate far less money than even $1 app sales. Now maybe that's the brokers etc... But there's also a reason why Hulu shut down their purely ad supported tier, and none of the big companies are leaning into that. Only "subscribe and get ads" lower dollar tiers.
I'm no super expert, but I think ads are still very inefficiant ways to make money... the profit per customer is very small even with the most privacy invasive blast you away with everything aspect. I don't claim to be an expert, but it appears to me an ad supported service needs around 100x more users to make the same money as a low cost service. However, in actual userbases it goes closer to 1000x when that offer is on the table.