Wealth of information is creating a scarcity of attention. In todays world our most important asset is "attention". Even though attention is so precious, we give it away cheaply. Internet in multiple forms secures a lot of our attention.
Considering the avalanche of information that is available, companies have created technologies to select and present the content that grabs our attention. Diving deep into this, the three key players involved in the system are content creators, content consumers and companies selling products. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook allows content creators to put their content. Companies are allowed to advertise their products. Consumers get the content from the content creators and the advertisements are sandwiched in the feed. There is a lot of investment done in building machine learning algorithms to deliver advertisements and content to match the consumers interest and filter out the rest. Google, Twitter, Facebook etc. run multi million dollar infrastructure to curate the advertisements and content for the consumers. Another type of content is blogs and creator specific websites. The advertising model for these users is also similar where companies like google provides the creators a way to show advertisements on their website/blogs. Advertisers sign up on these platforms to showcase their ads. At a high level, the overall system creates a win win situation for everyone except consumers.
Consumers feel drained of their precious attention. Consumers feel drained because of inefficiencies in the system. The inefficiency that I am referring here is the signal to noise ratio on the advertisements that are shown on internet. Even after spending millions of dollars on the ad infrastructure trying to "personalize" a lot of consumers either filter out the noise with tools such as ad-blockers and many do not even click to the advertisements. Those who are forced to watch ads (you tube ads) feel frustrated. Net result is internet is polluted with ads.
Inefficiencies are "pot of gold"
User frustration generally is because of inefficiencies. Inefficiencies creates growth opportunities for disruption and many entrepreneurs that I follow call it the "pot of gold". I hope one day someone will come-up with the a system to resolve this inefficiency and hopefully this blog will spark ideas into some of the startup founders who are passionate about solving this problem. I have been thinking about this problem for a while, how will the advertising industry actually gets efficient and reach a stage where ad pollution is reduced. After few months of mulling over this, one idea that came to my mind is almost inverted to the idea that is followed by the current advertising system. Before I get to the idea, I defined certain goals that I wanted to achieve with the idea.
These are the goals:
1. Consumers must crave and seek advertisements.
2. Consumers must not feel drained from advertisements.
3. Advertisements quality must improve over time.
4. Cost of creating advertisements should go down for companies.
5. Companies are able to show advertisements to users who are genuinely interested in their products.
Inversion Advertising Technology Idea
The core principle behind the idea is to make ad creation and placement work in a distributed and de-centralized manner. In addition, users get paid to watch ads and read emails instead of it being a free activity.
Companies seek out to its users to create ads for their products. In return, the users of the product are paid for creating good and effective advertisement. Recommending a product to a friend or followers is right now a free activity for most users. Users create advertisements about the product that they share on their portal ( blogs) or social media. There will be an automated system that has criteria built into it around paying based on number of people who follow a specific user, number of times ads are watched and clicked. This gives leverage not just for big social media influencers but influencers of medium to small size with hundreds or thousands of followers too. The company that is trying to advertise, gets an effective word of mouth advertisement at a cheaper cost because they will not have to pay for the content creation to advertisers who charge quite a lot. It is also hard to find out if the ads will be effective or not. In this model as the relation of creator and consumer is already built on trust, the advertisements will be more effective.
On the consumer side we innovate and bring "attention" the precious resource at the center stage and people get paid for spending their attention. Watching an advertisement is currently a free activity. We create a specific ad portal where companies chose to showcase their ads. Consumers will signup on watching advertisements on specific things. Users can chose to share data with companies about watching their advertisement. Companies get data about individuals who saw the advertisement and thus companies can follow up with the users through emails. Email reading is also paid, users are spending their attention and companies will have to pay for the attention they got from the user. This could be as low as one dollar per email.
Why will this model work?
Thoughts in the section above are my conjectures and I am not claiming that I know for sure they will work. I will explain my rationale and try to see if the goals mentioned above in the problem statement are met. Combining the two models above (de-centralized ad creation plus placement and pay users to watch advertisements), advertisement creators are incentivized to create good advertisements because if their ads are not getting clicked, they will not get paid. If the ads are good, consumers will seek for good advertisements to understand the product better. The quality of advertisement will also improve because advertisements that are not getting traction will die (theory of evolution) and get pruned automatically. Ads that are working well will be re-shared by the followers. Companies have to pay only if the advertisements are good to the ad creators, so the cost of these advertisements should also go down. In addition, creators are placing these ads on their social media and blog websites, reducing bidding costs for the companies for random spots that are not effective.
Users are also getting paid for the attention they gave to a product and do not feel drained. Above all, Internet will be advertisement pollution free.
PS: Coming up with an idea (inventing) is much easier as compared to building a workable solution ( innovating and executing ). I am sure there are a bunch of gotcha's and a lot of data crunching that needs to happen to prove or disprove some of the opinions that I shared in the blog.
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