I love ads
Ads are a beautiful thing. They give us the best free services, keep cable TV prices in check (somewhat), and can even provide recommendations for products that may be useful. I'm a huge supporter of ads on the internet and hate it when people install plugins like Adblock for Firefox. With that said, I hate obtrusive ads that attempt to annoy or deceive, like pop-ups, pop-unders, full page Flash ads, and ads pretending to find viruses and spyware on people's computers.
There's a lot of free services that I really enjoying using on a daily basis on the internet. Google, Gmail, news websites, etc... All of these things have one thing in common that keep me from having to pay for them: ads. As annoying as some people think they are, getting into the habit of blocking them is counterproductive to the expectation and appreciate of free services online. Do you really think that a great free email service like Gmail would be available and be as good of a product as it is without ads?
You have to keep in mind that Google is not a search engine company, they're an advertising company. Their main source of revenue ($16.4 billion in 2007, according to Wikipedia) came from their AdWords program. What's this do? It allows webmasters to display ads for relevant services, websites, etc... on their websites. Without ads, Google wouldn't be the company it is today and we'd be missing out on a lot of free resources on the net. A few things I use from Google daily (for free) are: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google News, Blogger, and iGoogle. I guess I wouldn't know what I was missing if Google never became the advertising behemoth it is, but I'm happy about what they've become and what they do.
Cable TV is probably a pretty bad example, due to what everyone (myself included) thinks are incredibly high prices. I think that cable providers would cite lack of advertising revenue as an excuse to significantly increase the cost of cable TV to the consumer if their ad spots on TV networks were taken away or limited. Also keep in mind that it's still possible to get free TV, even with the change to DTV in 2009. Ads pay for that.
Radio is a fantastic example, though. More and more people are tuning out of traditional terrestrial radio stations and taking their listening elsewhere. I'd imagine that much of the migration is due to the amount of ads that we have to listen to before we can hear a couple of songs in a row. This sucks, but it's because people don't like listening to ads. Radio ads make a station money because they sell them for a price that varies based on the number of listeners. The more listeners a station has, the more it can charge for the ads it plays and the less it has to play them. As listeners ditch radio for their iPods, radio stations get less per ad and need to run more of them to keep the revenue up. People think that they don't need traditional radio stations anymore, but if they were to disappear I'm quite sure they'd be missed. I know that I rarely listen to CDs or music from a portable player in my car. My commute isn't that long and I don't drive around as much as others might. I love listening to the radio when I'm driving. It's a way for me to discover new music and listen to a greater variety of music than what I have on my iPhone. I'd really miss it if my favorite stations were forced to close up shop or make me pay for them somehow.
Whenever a new service comes out online that I find myself enjoying, I like to think of what it's financial future will be and how it plans to earn money. Services like Twitter, for example, worry me. I really enjoying using Twitter to update people that don't care about what I'm doing right now. I also like to read what my friends and co-workers are up to. The thing is, Twitter hasn't turned a profit yet and there's no ads in sight. Right now Twitter is "making" money through investments. These investors are assuming that Twitter has a good business model somewhere (and I hope that they've been sold on one that the public doesn't know about) and will make money somewhere down the line. I've always said that they should have ads. Take the Twitter client Twitterific, for example: they place ads in between tweets to offset the costs associated with developing the free version of the iPhone client. Awesome idea. Twitter should adopt this, too.
Sure, Twitter is just a small fry compared to the other services I've mentioned but I think it demonstrates very well that a service that so many people enjoy using many times a day hasn't found a way to make any money yet. This is a dangerous habit to get into, and I'm seeing more websites and services doing this every day. If this keeps up we might see another .com bust, in a sense, where a huge number of websites disappear over night (though not all at once) due to lack of continued investments which would be due to a lack of a business model. I love seeing companies with such a simple, cool, and fun idea like Twitter make a lot of money... especially when it's not from my pocket.
Ads can sometimes be annoying and take up valuable screen space on everyone's busy computer monitors, but they're a necessary evil. Without them, innovation and the availability of such a wide range of services for no cost to the user would be severely limited. Everyone needs to make a buck, you know, so consider removing that ad-blocking plugin or just don't download one if you don't already have one. How terrible are text or banner ads, anyway? Remember: they're paying for the services you use so that you don't have to.
There's a lot of free services that I really enjoying using on a daily basis on the internet. Google, Gmail, news websites, etc... All of these things have one thing in common that keep me from having to pay for them: ads. As annoying as some people think they are, getting into the habit of blocking them is counterproductive to the expectation and appreciate of free services online. Do you really think that a great free email service like Gmail would be available and be as good of a product as it is without ads?
You have to keep in mind that Google is not a search engine company, they're an advertising company. Their main source of revenue ($16.4 billion in 2007, according to Wikipedia) came from their AdWords program. What's this do? It allows webmasters to display ads for relevant services, websites, etc... on their websites. Without ads, Google wouldn't be the company it is today and we'd be missing out on a lot of free resources on the net. A few things I use from Google daily (for free) are: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google News, Blogger, and iGoogle. I guess I wouldn't know what I was missing if Google never became the advertising behemoth it is, but I'm happy about what they've become and what they do.
Cable TV is probably a pretty bad example, due to what everyone (myself included) thinks are incredibly high prices. I think that cable providers would cite lack of advertising revenue as an excuse to significantly increase the cost of cable TV to the consumer if their ad spots on TV networks were taken away or limited. Also keep in mind that it's still possible to get free TV, even with the change to DTV in 2009. Ads pay for that.
Radio is a fantastic example, though. More and more people are tuning out of traditional terrestrial radio stations and taking their listening elsewhere. I'd imagine that much of the migration is due to the amount of ads that we have to listen to before we can hear a couple of songs in a row. This sucks, but it's because people don't like listening to ads. Radio ads make a station money because they sell them for a price that varies based on the number of listeners. The more listeners a station has, the more it can charge for the ads it plays and the less it has to play them. As listeners ditch radio for their iPods, radio stations get less per ad and need to run more of them to keep the revenue up. People think that they don't need traditional radio stations anymore, but if they were to disappear I'm quite sure they'd be missed. I know that I rarely listen to CDs or music from a portable player in my car. My commute isn't that long and I don't drive around as much as others might. I love listening to the radio when I'm driving. It's a way for me to discover new music and listen to a greater variety of music than what I have on my iPhone. I'd really miss it if my favorite stations were forced to close up shop or make me pay for them somehow.
Whenever a new service comes out online that I find myself enjoying, I like to think of what it's financial future will be and how it plans to earn money. Services like Twitter, for example, worry me. I really enjoying using Twitter to update people that don't care about what I'm doing right now. I also like to read what my friends and co-workers are up to. The thing is, Twitter hasn't turned a profit yet and there's no ads in sight. Right now Twitter is "making" money through investments. These investors are assuming that Twitter has a good business model somewhere (and I hope that they've been sold on one that the public doesn't know about) and will make money somewhere down the line. I've always said that they should have ads. Take the Twitter client Twitterific, for example: they place ads in between tweets to offset the costs associated with developing the free version of the iPhone client. Awesome idea. Twitter should adopt this, too.
Sure, Twitter is just a small fry compared to the other services I've mentioned but I think it demonstrates very well that a service that so many people enjoy using many times a day hasn't found a way to make any money yet. This is a dangerous habit to get into, and I'm seeing more websites and services doing this every day. If this keeps up we might see another .com bust, in a sense, where a huge number of websites disappear over night (though not all at once) due to lack of continued investments which would be due to a lack of a business model. I love seeing companies with such a simple, cool, and fun idea like Twitter make a lot of money... especially when it's not from my pocket.
Ads can sometimes be annoying and take up valuable screen space on everyone's busy computer monitors, but they're a necessary evil. Without them, innovation and the availability of such a wide range of services for no cost to the user would be severely limited. Everyone needs to make a buck, you know, so consider removing that ad-blocking plugin or just don't download one if you don't already have one. How terrible are text or banner ads, anyway? Remember: they're paying for the services you use so that you don't have to.
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