If ad companies would be paid according to customer conversion rate instead of how many ads they spam everywhere, it would collapse within a financial quarter.

Thinking that people support a brand or product that constantly annoys them is next-level stupid, but it's their main strategy. Google's conversion rate is less than 4% and instead of realizing that spamming trillions of ads on every site is causing that abysmal rate, they double down and get off to bigger "reach".

Also, Google lied to customers of their TrueView ads and just presented people muted autoplay ads instead. Here's an analysis about that.

https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-trueview-ads

tl;dr the only one benefitting from ads is Google.

[–] Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Sure. But it doesn't work that way, it works this way.

[–] csolisr@communities.azkware.net 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

As aptly explained by writer Cory Doctorow:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

[+] Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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[–] csolisr@communities.azkware.net 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, for most technology startups there are exactly two ways to pay salaries to the developers: getting investors (which lead to the exact cycle that I explained earlier) or paywalling the site up the wazoo (which leads to the community being necessarily smaller than it could have been otherwise).

[+] Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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[–] csolisr@communities.azkware.net 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And even with no capitalism involved in the equation, how do we convince the government to get taxpayers to foot the bill for something as mundane as an image hosting service? Especially in an environment where even art and education are being severely restricted in cash flow due to them being "non-essential services"?

[–] Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In terms of getting that through I really don't think it would be difficult, the main barrier is ideology as the actual usefulness of it is very obvious and it's easy to make the historic case that the private sector fails this industry over and over again. The biggest issue you would face is the one of whether porn should be allowed on it or not and I'd expect it to be a "not" outcome even in a socialist government. As for the costs point I don't see an issue, if they're profit-driven to begin with then they can run at break-even for government with the surplus either going to workers or going to improvement in quality of the services instead of to the investors.

Ideally I think a hybrid of private an national seems to work best, let the private sector build shit then take the important ones from them. At least while most of the world is still capitalist.