https://doctorow.medium.com/so-youve-decided-to-unfollow-me-7452c96b4772
"It’s hard to overstate how
liberating the early years of internet publishing
were. After a century of publishing driven by the needs of an audience, we
could finally switch to a model driven by the interests of writers.
That meant that instead of trying to figure out what some “demographic” wanted
to read about, we wrote what
we wanted to read, and then waited for people
who share our interests to show up and read and comment and write their own
blogs and newsletters and whatnot.
When the first ad networks came along, they leaned into this model: “Here is a
writer whose audience has this approximate composition and interests; if that’s
a group you’re trying to reach, then here’s a rate card to show those people
ads.”
Back in those days, it seemed that ad targeting would enable more niches, more
“long tail” publications tailoring to the esoteric, gnarly interests of writers
and readers.
But that was wrong. As behavioral ad targeting took off, and with it, social
networks and recommendation algorithms, the money shifted to follow readers
around on the internet. Some readers were worth more than others. Showing an ad
for a contingency liability lawyer to someone with a mesothelioma diagnosis was
worth a bundle, for example, but you didn’t have to write about asbestos or
lung cancer to score ad revenue from that user.
Rather, if you could suck in a
massive, undifferentiated audience, the ad
targeting algorithms would segment them for you, matching the reader with the
advertiser willing to pay the most to reach them.
We know what happened next: sensationalism, clickbait, cute animals…An
explosion of
broadly targeted material intended to serve as a funnel for
narrowly targeted ads."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
