It's almost like the growth plan of every tech company in the last decade or so... Grow big by burning capital ("to hell with cost of acquisition our CLV will be so high once they're locked in"); build an ad network; realise an operating profit; fight tooth and nail to protect that ad network...
Yeah, with youtube it kind of makes sense that the ads would be there. Uber (TIL), Windows 11, and non-media experiences/services/goods in general looking for ways to sell ads makes my skin crawl.
Just wait until doorbells play you an ad when you press the button.
If given a single magical wish, I wonder how much havoc I could wreck by wishing that immediately before someone intends to purchase ad time or join an ad network or whatever they mystically gain an understanding of exactly what the ROI is going to be for them. My conceit is that 99% of entities that purchase ad time have a significantly negative ROI because at the end of the day the only thing that an advertiser has to be good at selling to exist is their own services.
Things like doorbells/thermostats/light switches I'm not too worried about because they don't have network effects -- I can build my own with very little time investment and it can have better features and more reliability than most other options. The boundary here is currently probably TV's, it's insane to me that I can't get an affordable high quality TV without tracking and ads. I can block the TV at the router, but something like Amazon Sidewalk could be used to get around my sandboxing.
Platforms which require network effects to function like YouTube, Twitter, Email (deliverability), etc have a different dynamic. They're very difficult to abandon once you've come to rely on them.
> Things like doorbells/thermostats/light switches I'm not too worried about because they don't have network effects
Until the government comes in and mandates you need such and such light switch/thermostat/doorbell because of some regulation and conveniently all of the ones on the market which meet that spec are adware-infested nightmares.
And it doesn't even need to be some sort of authoritarian thing. Someone could just offer really cheap, highly functional devices that just happen to also have ads.
You can get your own doorbell, but if everyone else has a doorbell with ads on it, then you kind of still have to deal with it.
"It's okay, I'll just text them instead of going to their front door." Oh they'll consider that too. The free monthly subscription is only valid when you end up with at least 10 ad plays during that month. You don't even have to push the button, the doorbell sees you and plays the ad. And your friends have an incentive to take just a few extra seconds to get to the front door even though they texted back that the door was unlocked and they're right there.
I doubt this will happen but then again I never saw “Gas Station TV” (the most obnoxious ads ever at the fill pump) coming.
I saw a brand new machine for measuring blood pressure at the store and sat down because why not. It had unskippable screens demanding my personal info then it says “gathering your data” for a full THIRTY seconds after measuring my blood pressure which was conveniently just the amount of time to show me a commercial. It made me want to throw up.
I’m sure Walmart threw out all the old blood pressure machines that worked for 30 years and put these abominations in. It just makes my skin crawl how dystopian that machine was.
Question: If you'd rather they didn't exist than be ad-supported, why not just ignore them? Surely VC money wasn't going to keep things like YouTube, Uber, and the rest artificially cheap or free with no strings forever, right?
I feel like due to the VC-enabled delayed monetization that tends to happen with startups, we have all (me included) become convinced that it's sustainable to expect a bunch of ad-free, subscription-free content that just creates itself and teleports onto our computer, forever and ever. TANSTAAFL though.
Maybe? Every gas pump I've gone to in the past half decade has had a TV playing ads at me. So at least part of the oil company ecosystem has an ad component.
I recently moved back to a city where I rarely have to drive, which is nice, but I was driving a lot last year, and "do the pumps have those godawful TV ads or not" became my #1 criterion when deciding where to buy gas. What an unbearable racket!
Even Uber is becoming an ads company...