
Ask HN: Is the advertising funded model for Internet content likely to last? - koancone
I believe in the future we will move more toward a subscription funded model due to privacy concerns and people desiring higher quality content.
======
lwansbrough
Privacy doesn't seem to be a real concern for people in first world countries
(though I believe it should be.) There isn't a negative correlation between
quality and using advertising. Online advertising is just outside of the
Silicon Valley bubble where everyone burns VC capital instead of building a
profitable business from the start.

As for the lucrative nature of advertising, and it's future - I see it being
diminished, if for no other reason than people are increasingly using ad
blockers. Why are they using ad blockers? I think for most people it's just
about the visual clutter that ads create.

Online advertising is moving towards server based technology as the insanity
of header bidding comes to a head. This will mean an increasing number of ads
being served with less information about the end user (server based ads still
allow for defining user information, and user cookies will continue to exist
for users who aren't blocking ads.)

I think advertisers should focus more on native ads -- embedding ad content
directly into the existing application's UI -- instead of building their own
creatives, and develop some model for determining CPM partially based on how
it looks in the app. Part of the reason why people hate ads today is because
they look like ads. The more work publishers can put in to making ads look
nice on their website (within the applicable regulations -- ads should still
be labelled as such), the more likely I think people will be in accepting
them.

As for subscription models.. yeah, they're gonna grow - but they're not a
perfect solution either. Google has a backup, Google Contributor, which I
think is a really interesting idea (and Google isn't the only company to
execute on that idea) but it's still really hard to get people to assign value
to a website visit.

