I flipped through an impressively thick US Wired Magazine today – unfortunately, it’s not thick with content, but rather with ads… Loads of them. For a paragraph of content, I have to turn about ten pages. That’s not so cool, and definitely not a great user experience. I even started using post-its to mark a few interesting pages – once I found them, in all that mess.
I remember the day a sponsored ‘ad-email’ sneaked into my inbox. I was outraged.
And now that Twitter is under all this pressure to make money, we’d better hold tight as ads creep allover our feeds.
Will the day ever come when content can pay for itself? Or the day ads are so good that they won’t be called ‘ads’ anymore? Hyper-personalization tops the to-do lists of all major consumer IT companies. But will it really work? And when? Do we honestly believe that we can crack the problem of über-targeted advertising?
Or will someone come up with another awesome ad-free business model? A scary thought, to think of if, as it has the potential to completely wipe out a couple of the major players in this game, and would revolutionize the way we go about things these days. Just a thought.