MmMmMax Headroom Here...

You know, this whole internet/advertising thing could come back to bite us in the ass.

I’ve come to notice a vicious cycle forming. There is a high demand for free stuff- free apps, free video, free services- that is supported by advertising revenue from these products. As we desire more free stuff, advertising will have to provide even more money to support the growing free-stuff industry, so on and so forth.

In my mind, this could end a number of ways, pretty much all bad.

First, I figure that as the volume of ads increases, people are going to become desensitized to them, requiring more adds to sway consumers in the same way. The more ads, the more desensitized consumers will become until, finally, advertising has no effect on purchasing decisions by the consumer. The advertising industry will collapse (perhaps only the portion associated with free stuff), and all the free stuff will no longer be free.

The second option is that advertising will become so intrusive (due to increased volume caused by de-sensitivity) that it will become more and more worth it to consumers to buy some of the formerly free products (think about the add-free version of every app).  A rift will be created between the types of services that are worth it to pay for, and those that aren’t.  As the services become more advanced, they will cost more, until a little advertising would be worth it to take the price down a bit. The cycle of increased adds/pay more will continue until there is a very small handful of products worth paying for, and everything else will spiral out of control with adds until, again, advertising collapses.

Another option is that there will be some other source of money for the free stuff. For example, you can now trade some of your personal CPU power to the cloud for real-life money to buy things. Once advertising collapses or maxes itself out, we will just trade something else instead of our attention for free stuff, but there’s only so much to give.

I’m sure the simple calendar apps and such will remain cheap, but the rate of advance of tech and apps suggests that there is some seriously cool stuff on the horizon. I’m not sure when this whole thing will blow up, but it will be bad.