The day before I write this, I wore a T-shirt from a conference I attended a few years ago. It’s interesting how the T-shirt is one of the best parts of the conference, but after a couple of years in the closet, they all seem to blur together. This particular one I remember more because it was the last conference I attended before the world broke with the pandemic. Besides that fact and the terrible lunch they served, however, there’s another reason that I remember that particular conference.
A few days prior to that particular conference, I was going through an email with some pertinent information, and the email contained links to sponsors. I clicked through to one of the sponsor links, which was for a managed web hosting platform. Two days later, my wife showed me an ad for that hosting platform in her Facebook feed. Even though she doesn’t work in tech, and even though I don’t have a Facebook account, the platform had been able to connect our online personas and surface that ad to her.
I felt like I needed a shower.
Remember magazines? When you buy a magazine, even though you’re paying for the issue, there are still ads every few pages. That’s been a mainstay of how the industry pays its writers for as long as the industry has been around. The same for newspapers. Even though you’re paying for the issue, you’re going to see the ads that have been purchased to run in that issue. That hasn’t changed because we read the paper on a screen now, and it likely won’t. It’s part of how the writers are paid, and the writers should be paid, and paid well. That’s all a long-winded way to say that I don’t have an issue with ads in general, at least not in that context.
I fundamentally disagree with the assumption that, because I use the web, a marketer has the right to know everything about me.
The web, however, was founded as an open and free exchange of information. Part of that freedom is anonymity inasmuch as a user chooses to be anonymous. I fundamentally disagree with the assumption that, because I use the web, a marketer has the right to know everything about me, or that my wife is married to a tech professional who has viewed information on a specific hosting platform because he is attending a specific conference.
I think that most web users are becoming wise to the underhanded tricks of surveillance capitalism and are choosing to run ad blockers and use more privacy-focused technology. As a result, as the advertising industry struggles to remember how it functioned before it was able to spy on our every thought, we are going to see more content move behind paywalls…what is being called the creator economy. Initially, there is going to be more friction to this idea because we’ve been conditioned to “free” content. Soon, however, we’ll begin paying for the content that’s important to us and forgetting the rest. I think that this will serve the dual effect of letting a lot of bad content slide to the background while good writers and podcasters with compelling ideas build relationships with their audiences. Free content will always be out there, and we’ll enjoy that of course, but we’ll be more willing to pay for the rest.
I’m looking forward to this transition, not just because it makes those working as content creators able to make a more viable living, but also because it’s a privacy win for all of us. The web remains open. Our lives remain private.
My wife isn’t spied on because of a conference I’m attending.
When this change has solidified, I’ll look back and remember the old days of less privacy. Every time I wear that T-shirt.
Image attribution: Mike Cohen under Creative Commons.