Who will stand up for advertising?
The Conversaton published my quick overview of business models for the creative industries in the latter weeks of February. I shortly had to laugh at Peter Wilkin's sarcastic suggestion that ads be embedded into songs in response to a copyright-is-futile comment from Mike Swinbourne. Wilkin's tongue-in-cheek hope is that we'll get so sick of the results that we'll go back to paying for music.
I've previously written about the way that the need for advertising money drives data collection machinery like that of Google and Facebook. Wilkin's suggestion at least has the virtue that music listeners would be forced to confront the results of their unwillingness to pay.
Advertising has historically been very successful in raising funds for free-to-air radio and television, print news and search engines, but I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone praising it for its support of great art. At best, people accept it as a necessary evil to be endured in return for regular entertainment. (I presume that marketers themselves have more positive opinions but I don't read the publications in which they offer their views.)
Perhaps those who suggest advertising as the solution for raising funds ought to make the case for its greatness, if this is what they really believe. The apparent lack of any such case leaves me wondering if they really appreciate advertising's contribution, or if they're just being seduced by apparently-free content.
Having had a life-long hatred of advertising, I decided some time ago to make a point of taking the paid version rather than the ad-supported version whenever the former was available. So I pay for someone to host this web site and my e-mail accounts, I pay subscriptions to web sites that I read regularly, and I pay for shareware that I find useful.
This policy has its limits, particularly when it comes to sites or applications that I use only casually. Without an efficient infrastructure and user interface for making small electronic payments, it's difficult for creators to offer paid-for access to small items at a reasonable cost. Perhaps here I'd concede the value of advertising, if only because twenty-odd years of work on "micro-payments" has amounted to more or less nothing.
I wonder if those who support advertising as a solution more generally would be prepared to acknowledge a similar policy. Would anyone commit to a policy of not fast-forwarding through ads on video, not installing pop-up blockers, and not subverting data collection machinery by entering fake data? And is anyone (who is not themselves a marketer) prepared to write an ode to the wonders that advertising has brought us?
