Free Service Attracts An Audience, An Audience Attracts Advertisements

As I’m reading “The Revolution Will Not Be Monetized” I’m thinking to myself “this can’t be true!” Who do you know that still receives a newspaper or their favorite magazine? I don’t know any. I grew up watching my grandparents read the newspaper, daily. I’d watch my Grandfather finish one page of the paper and pass it off to my Grandma. They went like this until my Grandfather ran out of pages to pass over. Even I was allowed to join in the mix, but I wasn’t interested until I saw color. You know, the comics. Even my grandparents quit ordering the newspaper about eight years ago. I watched them read the newspaper that way for the better part of my childhood and they traded in the old finger staining print for the Internet. They didn’t need the newspaper for their news anymore. With this in mind, it’s hard for me to believe media sources received ten times less than traditional print media in terms of advertising in 2010. One of Garfield’s arguments in this article is that the Internet is much larger so there’s more places for advertisements to be placed so the demand is suppressed, along with the price. I disagree because people that want trustworthy and consistent news will undoubtedly stay loyal to one or a few news sources. Advertisers pay based off of the volume of viewers a site attracts. If you have a consistent number of viewers, like television, you can name your price. Secondly, Garfield argues that no one willingly clicks on an advertisement. At this point I began to think that “This guy is the actual Garfield from the comics I used to read with my Grandparents as a kid; He is truly comical.” How can you compare unwillingness to click on Internet advertising with print advertising? How many times have to been reading the newspaper and clicked on an advertisement in it? You haven’t because you can’t. Businesses pay for advertisements for them to be seen, not clicked. Being clicked is a bonus but any one that knows anything about product placement knows that the subtlest of reveals is enough exposure to cut a check. Provide a service that people want for free, attract users, and sell advertising slots accordingly using a model similar to that of television. That’s how advertising works and you can’t say there is no demand there. This very technique has made ordinary computer coders with a simple idea millions, if not billions, of dollars. Knowing your market via data gathering on users can only help improve your advertising potential; I don’t understand why Garfield thinks Internet media relies on it.