Or users could toss a few bucks to their instance and the instances get way way more than ad revenue would bring.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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And then they use PayPal Payments which doesn't support paying as guest in your country. Would optional ads work? You know, you could enable them in profile settings. I've seen that in some app already.
There are tons of ways to get money moved around. Heck even crypto works.
I think the issue with ads is that the only one winning is the company selling the ad. They give the instances a $100 to have show up on every user's feed for a month. You're talking about a couple million views for almost nothing. The instance gets $100 which doesn't necessarily offset much and the users get ads which they need to optionally block. Too many get blocked and the ad seller stops selling ads to this instance.
Or everyone sends $5 a year to their instance. For even the smaller ones you're talking about tens of thousands of dollars which can pay for keeping the instances up and running on good hardware.
The 100$ was an example but I get your point. It feels like every option leads more or less to some billion dollar company becoming richer.
Yeah I'm sure you can get more from the ads if you get a bunch of sponsors but honestly if people just paid an anual fee it would be better for everyone.
Would people pay ? Wiki barely gets by, we have so many models that are ad based but very few subscription based(am I wrong ?)
Why have ads at all? It's just wasteful and annoying.
Recently, Louis Rossman made an excellent point about advertising. When was the last time you saw and ad and suddenly felt like buying something? How often does that happen? Most of the time, the money spent on ads doesn’t actually do much other than annoy the people who are exposed to the ad. Providing good experiences to the customers is a far more effective way to advertise products or services.
So I can tell you from experience that there's a huge difference in terms of how much of your products you sell by doing advertising versus doing nothing. It's very rare that advertising is designed to take the person who's observing it from "IDK what this is" to "Holy crap I gotta go buy that" -- but building brand recognition, making people aware that your stuff exists, and yes sometimes having them see an ad for something and click on it and buy something, is 100% worth it when it's done right.
I actually do agree with you as to as lot of advertising on the modern internet, though. I think like a lot of areas of human endeavor, online advertising has been overrun by people who genuinely just have no clue what they're doing. Someone works at a company that has a river of money coming in, their job is to buy online ads, so they direct some of the river of money at buying obnoxious ads that do very little except piss people off (and, enable the site where they run to keep operating and paying their people, which is nice). It doesn't accomplish anything for the company they work for and no one notices, and that persists for years, and the internet as a whole is crapped up for everyone in general. :-/
I think about 95% of ad campaigns are no more effective than just listing the product and the price. Maybe 5% are creative or well targeted enough to actually influence some purchases.
Problem is the people in a position to evaluate effective advertising are mostly the same group that gets paid by to create advertising. There's no one running around to businesses trying to sell them on the idea that advertisements aren't all that effective and they could just save their money on much simpler communications. Plus we indoctrinate hoards of 'marketing' graduates into the cult of advertising every year. There's a critical mass of people that just uncritically embrace the idea that modern advertising is the only way to sell a product, and many of their careers depend on that remaining a widely accepted idea.
Don’t these people ever study the effectiveness of different types of advertising? In physics, chemistry and biology you need evidence to support a belief. Otherwise, it’s just a questionable hypothesis.
I think they probably do study the effectiveness to a degree, but there's no structure or incentive for peer review in marketing research. So their methods are likely tuned to find whatever they think will convince their clients to spend more on advertising.
If they find a simple $1000 newspaper ad is just as effective as a a $100K television ad, they can just say "Our research has found that $100K TV ads are effective."
But businesses don’t have an infinite supply of money, now do they? Making smart business decisions means spending as little as possible and getting as much as possible in return. It’s in the best interests of the business owner to spend money on efficient advertising instead of wasteful advertising.
Absolutely. But most businesses don't have the wherewithal to hire impartial analysts and statisticians to evaluate the effectiveness of their ad buys. They have to rely on a combination of intuition, customer feedback, but mostly on outside advertising professionals, and those professionals have every incentive to maintain the impression that spending more on advertising it the best decision.
You are absolutely right. There’s clearly a conflict of interest. I also have a feeling that companies buying advertising services don’t really know what they’re buying, what they’re supposed to get, what they could be getting in the best case scenario etc.
I hate ads like the rest of us but can community donations sustain the instance ? If they do why dont we have that model yet ? Why we still keeping using YouTube and Gmail etc ? What percentage of community would donate ? Will be donating to the community or the server instance ? Will there be push back from users of small communities who are paying if the money goes purely into the maintenance of large communities ?
I think Reddit gold was a brilliant way to support the platform and get something in return. I’ve been thinking of supporting various FOSS projects, but getting nothing but a a warm and fuzzy feeling in return just feels inadequate. Getting a Debian/Inkscape/Firefox hoodie sounds much more appealing to me, so recently I’ve been lookin for those sorts of donation options.
Lemmy.store to support lemmy.world, the community can design and sell custom community themed merch.
We could have an instance solely dedicated to advertising and see who signs up.
Just create advertising community and let all advertise on that community alone ? Thats a good idea, kind of like 'deals' but you pay to post there.
I guess my comment was facetious. I don't mind if someone would try to implement it. Of course getting people to stay federated with such a place may be a challenge, but maybe some will want the money.
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