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The entire Television industry is being supported by ad revenue for decades. Why can't the same model work for the web?

• keiferski 16y ago
  http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is-failing-on-the-internet/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is-failing-... (Techcrunch, I know. But it's a really good article from an academic.) From the article: People don’t trust ads. There is a vast literature to support this. Is it all wrong? People don’t want ads. Again, there is a vast literature to support this. Think about your own behavior, you own channel surfing and fast forwarding and the timing of when you leave the TV to get a snack. Is it during the content or the commercials? People don’t need ads. There is a vast amount of trusted content on the net. Again, there is literature on this. But think about how you form your opinion of a product, from online ads or online reviews? There is no shortage of places to put ads. Competition among them will be brutal. Prices will be driven lower and lower, for everyone but Google. Also, don't forget that the NYTimes is instituting a paywall, and the Wall Street Journal already has one. These sites obviously couldn't function solely on ads, and they get massive amounts of traffic. Likewise for Hulu: they couldn't get by with ads alone either. Unless your web business has an extremely low overhead (read: simple web functions) I seriously doubt ads will be enough.
  • sagacity 16y ago
    >> The entire Television industry is being supported by ad revenue for decades. Why can't the same model work for the web? << Well-said. As a matter of fact, it can; and it is, today. (Those who are not convinced, just look at Google's IRS filings for the past 2-3 years.)