Comment by giancarlostoro
7 months ago
I've thought about how I'd build one and I keep landing on content based ads, give me ads that target page content. You are already interested in the content you see, so why not. Generic "show everyone you can" ads should also be fine, and slightly discounted. But I do wonder if it would even be enough to keep the lights on.
The trouble is that ad-based business models incentivize maximizing engagement, because more engagement gives you more places to put ads. It turns out maximizing engagement is the primary driver of all of the bad things about social media, and honestly the modern internet as a whole. Regardless of how the ads are chosen, ad-based models will always end up at the same place: pushing extremist content in order to maximize engagement.
you'd think Reddit could handle this, since subreddits are very narrow and coupled to interests. but I guess you'd also think a PC review site would be able to do the same thing and not show car ads or etc
The old internet used to be like this, you'd pick the type of ads you wanted on your site, so a lot of sites had ads that looked like the content on the site.