

What if all Web ads were blocked? 10 speculative scenarios. - technologizer
http://technologizer.com/2009/08/12/block-web-ads/

======
qw
News sites would probably accept articles from companies if they were paid
enough. If we were lucky, they would add a small disclaimer somewhere at the
bottom of the article.

And they would probably also sneak in comments about a company inside their
articles and comments. Some of them would be from good companies, such as
Amazon. Who would blame them? Amazon is such a great company with reasonable
prices and delivery. You can also depend on Amazon unlike some of the no-name
competitors. Who would want to trust an unknown company, when they can use a
trusted company like Amazon.

Where was I... oh, they would certainly integrate paid contents in a sneaky
way.

~~~
Retric
Well played. They used to do this all the time in such an obvious way with
radio, but the new idea is to causally include the product in movies, books
and TV without up selling it. So you blog about your great run yesterday, and
happen to mention breaking in your Nike's. Or talk about a date and mention
which beer you drank. The idea is to get people to think people like them use
product X.

~~~
jerf
I can't find it in myself to get worked up about straight-up product
placement. In some ways it's less disconcerting to see a guy drinking a Coke
than drinking Unspecified-Beverage-In-A-Vaguely-Red-Can-With-Electrical-Tape.
I also have a hard time imagining that even a quite popular show could survive
having the characters in the show repeatedly directly shill for a product,
long before we even approach the level of ads television or radio used to
carry directly. While I've used television terminology, I think this carries
across all media.

Any sort of recurring program (TV-like video, blog, newspaper, etc) spend
credibility when they do that, unless they are very carefully ensuring that
they only talk about products they care about personally, which only works for
things that _are_ personal productions. (One clue I use is that a normal
person should often get excited about a product that has been out for months
or years, rather than one that just came out. Nobody gets everything brand new
every day.) Who will read something that is just shilling, over and over
again? Perhaps not nobody, but I won't be forced to read it, so I guess I'm
still not worried about it.

~~~
logic
As for surviving direct shilling, I present "The Biggest Loser" as a data
point. The most recent season became a barrage of direct product placement
experiments.

[http://www.dietsinreview.com/diet_column/04/jillian-
michaels...](http://www.dietsinreview.com/diet_column/04/jillian-michaels-
dishes-on-biggest-loser-product-placement-and-that-fight/)

[http://www.realityblurred.com/realitytv/archives/the_biggest...](http://www.realityblurred.com/realitytv/archives/the_biggest_loser_5/2008_Mar_19_tim_gunn_product_placement)

More discussion of product placement rankings at the Neilson blog:
[http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/amazing-race-
ap...](http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/amazing-race-apprentice-
idol-dominate-reality-show-product-placement/)

This isn't even close to new, we're just finally catching up with online
media.

------
aw3c2
Ha, that url was blocked by my aggressive filters. :)

"Scenario #6: Professional content dies almost immediately." is ridiculous.
There was a web before advertisements and it was (and still is) full of the
finest professional content. If your business model is based on ads, then you
have no business model. Internet ad monetization is nothing but a gamble.

Let's see how many ad-less "professional" (as in useful and of varying
quality) sites I frequently use.

wikipedia

openstreetmap

wolfram alpha

media archives of hacker conferences

lots of open-source related websites

countless other wikis

countless sites by people who love doing what they do, be it hacking,
creating, analysing or whatever else

With no more ads I would anticipate more actual content created out of
affection (might not be the correct word, no english native speaker here?) and
less "this is where people click on most banners, so let's shove more if it
down their throats".

~~~
derefr
I agree, mostly; there are a lot of other business models for sites: donations
(Wikipedia), complementary to a pay product (Wolfram Alpha), scratching an
itch (many wiki sites), subscriptions, etc. However, on this point:

> There was a web before advertisements

Was there? How many people used it? What for? What were the business models? I
find it hard to believe that people were putting their credit cards out over
the web in great numbers back in 1995, so were these sites just operating
under the assumption that they were generating brand-awareness, or something
like that?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Amazon were selling books online in 1995. Not sure how they were advertising,
I'm guessing it was mainly offline, though I imagine possibly signature ads on
newsgroups may have been part of it.

