An Unsustainable Business Model? Adsense, Stalking Marketers, Facebook, and all that

Those of you who access this site through its Web page may have noticed that we’ve said farewell to Adsense. The day I went to Macy’s site in search of a handbag on sale and then went to the site of a manufacturer whose style I admired and THEN came here to answer a reader’s comment, only to find an image of one of those purses being FLASHED IN MY FACE from the left-hand ad slot — not just up there, but flashing on and off at me — then reloaded the page to get a new ad that was a trailer for a gruesome, violent movie(!)…that was the day I decided Adsense had to go.

And gone it is.

A couple of years ago, Adsense was making a modest but steady income for Funny, for reasons that I don’t understand. Then, presumably for other reasons that I don’t understand, revenues fell off. More recently, Google has coughed up a hundred bucks about every three or four months. I don’t consider that worth the annoyance of having my site junked up. Nor do I care to have my readers annoyed by Adsense marketers stalking them around.

As a practical matter, my guess is that one reason the Adsense income has gone away is that more people have installed software that blocks advertising. I had such a program on my system for awhile, but had to disable it because I did need to see what Adsense was doing for/to Funny about Money. Heh. Now that the hawkers are gone, I guess I can reinstall that thing. 🙂

More to the point, I deeply resent being stalked by marketers. It gives me the creeps to see images of products for which I’ve idly shopped popping up at every turn on the Web and following me around until I clear all the cookies off my computer.

The other day — sometime within the last week or ten days — New York Times op-ed columnist Joe Nocera wrote a piece speculating that the digital economy has a built-in fatal error: its tendency to “hollow out the middle class.” Allowing that the idea is not original with him, Nocera credits his line of thought to Jaron Lanier, author of Who Owns the Future. The point being made is that digitization of media large and small and of many other kinds of industries has led to the permanent loss of phenomenal numbers of decently paying jobs. To the extent that job opportunities have been replaced, it has largely been by poorly paying (even non-paying!) piecemeal work. Like, for example, blogging for pay…

Kodak is offered as the example of the day. At the top of its game, Kodak employed more than 140,000 people. Instagram, the digital answer to Kodak, employed all of 13 people when it was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars.

Consider: the source of wealth for the likes of Instagram, Facebook, Google is the body of workers — de facto employees or contractors — who create the content that enriches these corporations. None of us are being paid for the work we do — unless you call a hundred bucks a quarter “pay.” Echoing Lanier, Nocera observes that “a digital economy that appears to give things away for free — in return for being able to invade the privacy of its customers for commercial gain — isn’t free at all.” And ultimately, by destroying the middle class (i.e., by eliminating the buying power of huge numbers of consumers), this business model undermines the businesses themselves.

Funny about Money, like most regularly published, competently written blogs, is essentially a micromagazine. As the site’s proprietor, I do everything I did as an editor and writer for Phoenix and Arizona Highways magazines…and then some. In fact, I do the work of about six people: researching, writing, editing, fact checking, freelance management, circulation. The only things I farm out are the digital equivalent of design and layout and (now to a much more limited degree) ad sales. At Phoenix, we had a half-dozen ad space sales reps, four designers, five editors, and a publisher. At Arizona Highways, which does not sell ad space, we had three editors (one of them very high-powered), a photo editor, three or four graphic designers, a marketing executive, a production manager, and a publisher. All of these were full-time jobs. In addition, both publications had substantial stables of freelance writers, photographers, and artists, who created most of the content.

In contrast, Funny about Money employs — if that’s the word that can be used — one writer/editor/publisher/circulation manager, one digital designer, and one two-person ad management company. None of those positions can be honored with the term “job.” And none of the work earns anything like a living wage, at least not off this site alone.

Funny can easily publish 25 or 30 articles a month. A monthly magazine publishes nothing like that much feature-length copy — those editorial staffs of upwards of a dozen people took about six or eight full-length articles to print each month, embellished by several fluffy little departments that, in the case of Phoenix Magazine, were essentially advertorial. Thus, as proprietor of FaM, I do about four times as much work for virtually no pay. Instead, what I get, in the construct that is digital marketing, is commercial exploitation by Google.

How can this possibly be sustainable? Sooner or later, the very basis of these outfits’ business model will collapse. It doesn’t make sense to work for nothing, and when fewer and fewer talented people can get jobs, then fewer and fewer dollars will be available to spend on the products the digital companies’ customers are advertising. Eventually, those customers will figure that out…and quit wasting their money on digital advertising.

Lanier suggests that site owners should be paid when their information is used: “content creators would receive micropayments” whenever their content is accessed.

Since FaM gets thousands of unique visitors a month, that would turn blogging into a sustainable model for me. If Google were paying me every time someone accesses a post, I might not object to running ads on my sites.

But for the time being, there’s nothing in it for me.

Along the same lines, following droves of young people I have pretty much abandoned Facebook. That thing is just too, too creepy for my taste. There, too, one is stalked by marketers pimping ads for whatever you might have happened to have seen on the Web. Worse, thanks to Facebook’s exploitive (non)privacy policies, anything you say or “like” in an unguarded moment can be used, with no payment to you, in an ad for some random product, and you give away all rights to any photographs or other creative content you post there.

That, my friends, amounts not only to an unconscionable invasion of your privacy but also to a gigantic. fucking. RIPOFF. Creative property is exactly that: property. Just because it appears on the Internet does not mean you should or do forfeit your rights to decide how and by whom it will be used, and for how much payment.

I’m not taking my FB profile down, much as I would like to, because FaM goes up there and so is distributed to everyone in the choir and to other friends who subscribe to FB. Ditto Twitter. But I don’t go there anymore, and I certainly don’t post comments there.

Sheeple, it is true, are stupid en masse. But we’re not that stupid. Sooner or later we figure it out. And when we do, the herd ambles away.