Standing up for advertising
Three months ago, I wondered who would stand up for advertising and its role in funding news, entertainment and other things that we think of as being "free". David Glance's Conversation column this week drew a few commenters who are, indeed, prepared to stand up for advertising.
Glance himself wonders if ad-blocking software will kill off on-line advertising as a business model, which he has read to be struggling to be relevant in an article in The Atlantic. That the advertising revenues of Google and others have already survived ten years of ad-blockers leads me to be sceptical of the threat they pose, but here I'm more interested in the comments on the article.
William Ferguson wisely points out that the adherents of ad-blocking need to be careful what they wish for: those ads are what pay for the goodies, and without revenue the goodies cannot continue to be made. He draws specific attention to advertising's support for small-time developers who don't have the fee-charging power of major software development houses. Michael Cahill argues that "the use of adblock software is morally equivalent to any other form of piracy" in that it is effectively taking something without paying the price, and implies that he'd rather have the advertising than have to pay.
(As an aside, Ferguson also notes that "it is extremely rare for anyone to shell out a couple of dollars on a totally unknown product, even with refund periods", which itself says something about the cheapness of software-buyers. I, and I'm sure plenty of other people, routinely pay much more than this to try out a new beer, a new restaurant, or a new holiday experience, so why do we baulk at paying a couple of dollars to try out an app?)
Perhaps it's worth noting that both Ferguson and Cahill are content producers according to their taglines (a software developer and journalist, respectively), while their opponents appear to be content users or at least thinking only about how they can use content. Ferguson and Cahill want to be paid for what they do, and know that they couldn't continue to do it if there wasn't money for it. User-centred critics, on the other hand, assert that it can all be done for nothing, but are conspicuously silent about actually doing it.
While I may have less love for advertising than either Ferguson or Cahill — I usually take the paid version given the choice, and I dread the idea of having to make my living from advertising — we're all of one mind in recognising that art (and software) needs to be resourced in one way or another. My view of apparently-free content isn't even incompatible with theirs: those who live by advertising know all too well that it's not just there out of some perverse desire to annoy users, but in fact an integral part of providing the services we like to call "free".
