The web’s walking dead and the future of advertising

Verizon has written down $4.6 billion of the value of two of the internet’s longest unliving zombies, AOL and Yahoo!, which a couple of years ago it hoped to revive to create a company, Oath, that would carve out a slice of the online advertising market. As I said at the time, fans of “The Walking Dead” will know that zombies can never return to the world of the living, and that nothing good can be done with the corpses of decrepit business models.

The business model of Oath, which will change its name to Verizon Media Group on January 1, 2019, dates back to the first years of the web: advertising as torture, the most annoying formats possible, which people now avoid by using advertising blockers. Verizon’s move is an implicit acknowledgment that investing in this type of model is throwing good money after bad and should lead many companies to reflect on their positions in the advertising business.

The most such models can hope for is to be part of that desperate world populated by the gullible who generate junk traffic on junk pages with zero impact, where some advertisers whose management should be sacked continue to buy space. From buying junk they go on to justify erroneous metrics and slide down into the world of click-fraud, bots or click-farms, in short, a losing game. As a rule, if an advertising business is based on torturing its potential customers, forcing them to look at something they don’t want to in exchange for access to content they’re trying to access, it’s going nowhere, no matter what the metrics say. Anybody who doesn’t get this is obsessed with the wrong metrics. The same applies to the web, television or any other media: technology and the market mean that sooner or later, content can be accessed without having to undergo torture first. If you can’t protect your users from torture, your model is dead, your users will flee as soon as they find some other way to access the content they want and you will pay the price.

Trying to prevent people from installing adblockers soon escalates into a tit-for-tat war. If you think that your users, by trying to avoid your junk advertising, are thieves, you might want to consider therapy, because there’s no place for you in today’s world. To understand this better, try putting yourself in your users’ position: would you want to endure junk advertising so you can read or watch the content you want?

The only future for advertising-based models is the one Google tried many years ago, and although the results weren’t brilliant, the company is still working on trying to convert advertising into part of a value proposition. Advertisers have to understand what people want and try to provide it without further annoyances or distractions. They have to understand that they’re not in the abuse business, and that it simply isn’t sustainable to try to trap people into looking at ads when they don’t want to do: the simple truth is that we’re not always shopping or in search mode. In other words, advertising isn’t going to produce immediate results: it’s not about good or bad advertising, per se: it’s just the way human beings function. If you want more immediate results, get into online gambling or drug dealing, which work along more physiological and are particularly suited for people with more relaxed moral standards. If you try to make your advertising-based business work like gambling or drugs, you are an idiot, a crook, or both.

A better approach is to try to genuinely get to know your customers, not so as to sell them stuff, but to give them the best possible service, try to make yourself needed, without overreaching yourself: one thing is knowing something about your customers, another is them feeling that your encroaching on their personal space. If during their visits to your site they find something interesting, that respects their privacy and doesn’t constitute a breach of their human rights, they may continue to visit and eventually, within reason, buy something. Otherwise, they will simply go somewhere else.

The walking dead of the web didn’t get that way out of ignorance, but because they couldn’t see the error of their ways, because they didn’t listen to the signals the market sent them. If you want to join their ranks, now you know how.

(En espa?ol, aquí)