One of the main reasons a website wants to increase its traffic and create a platform friendly to recurring users is so that they can then subject them to advertisements. Advertisements exist as the one of easiest paths for a website creator or business to generate money on the internet. For most social media sites it makes up bulk of their revenue, like with Facebook for example, who receive around 90% of total revenue in digital advertisements. In 2019, nearly every app or web page displays some form of advertisement, but how did we get here?
I’m going to look at the development of ads through the lens of their existence on Facebook. The first signs of the existence of ads was back when there was still ‘the’ attached to the front of its domain name. This was where flyers could be bought that were targeted towards a specific schools educational address.
They then started developing ads which purely existed down the side of your feed. These were mostly innocuous and it no way impacted your general use of the website. How well they targeted us a consumer also felt less as if they had been listening to your every conversation, like it does now.
Fast forward to today, and as well as ads that have been ‘suggested’ to you in your feed and along the side of your page, they also now have ads in between video viewing. This isn’t too much of a surprise, as places like YouTube and Twitch have also had advertisements on their videos for a while, but they aren’t skippable and if you wish to continue watch the video you have to endure the full length of whatever ad has been forced upon you.
Socialiam 