“if I’m causing harm through my work I would like to know about it”. Here is: sites that earn from ads effectively fight not for your attention, but your screen time. And your screen time is limited to 24h a day, minus such unwanted distractions as sleep, eating, etc.
And that’s the whole pie, it’s not extendable. When Facebook wins an hour of your screen time, Twitter looses it. There is no win-win.
So the sites use every and all tech to keep you glued to the screen (and to their site). That’s why we have video previews now. That’s why catchy (and misleading) titles. That’s why we’re fed outrage. That’s why news are negative. That’s why a lot of things that are bad on the Net.
And the problem is, once one site figures up something, others have to adopt it, too, because the pie is limited. Or they’ll lose.
Subscription based services, on the other hand, don’t have to care how much time you spend with them—as long as you keep the subscription. They don’t have to be evil to survive.
I don’t think this is a very good model for subscription services. Consider Netflix: they don’t do ads at all, subscription only. But they still optimize for watch time and other engagement metrics, because they’re very good proxies for retention.
Subscription based services, on the other hand, don’t have to care how much time you spend with them—as long as you keep the subscription. They don’t have to be evil to survive.
If subscriptions don’t have to be evil, why must ads be? You seem to be assuming advertising here means display advertising and are forgetting about things like cost-per conversion advertising where there’s not necessarily any value in keeping you looking at things, only at rarely getting you to look at the right thing that results in you buying something, which is not much different than getting you to pay to look at things via a subscription.
“if I’m causing harm through my work I would like to know about it”. Here is: sites that earn from ads effectively fight not for your attention, but your screen time. And your screen time is limited to 24h a day, minus such unwanted distractions as sleep, eating, etc.
And that’s the whole pie, it’s not extendable. When Facebook wins an hour of your screen time, Twitter looses it. There is no win-win.
So the sites use every and all tech to keep you glued to the screen (and to their site). That’s why we have video previews now. That’s why catchy (and misleading) titles. That’s why we’re fed outrage. That’s why news are negative. That’s why a lot of things that are bad on the Net.
And the problem is, once one site figures up something, others have to adopt it, too, because the pie is limited. Or they’ll lose.
Subscription based services, on the other hand, don’t have to care how much time you spend with them—as long as you keep the subscription. They don’t have to be evil to survive.
I don’t think this is a very good model for subscription services. Consider Netflix: they don’t do ads at all, subscription only. But they still optimize for watch time and other engagement metrics, because they’re very good proxies for retention.
If subscriptions don’t have to be evil, why must ads be? You seem to be assuming advertising here means display advertising and are forgetting about things like cost-per conversion advertising where there’s not necessarily any value in keeping you looking at things, only at rarely getting you to look at the right thing that results in you buying something, which is not much different than getting you to pay to look at things via a subscription.