A few years ago I made a post about running ads on cartoons and why it's not a very sound business model. I still agree with pretty much everything I said back then, but there's another angle that I only kinda touched on in that post - running ads has a general cheapening effect on the actual content, and it goes beyond ads being invasive and tacky.
Back in like 2014 youtube changed their system for how ad revenue was distributed and it fucked over certain kinds of content, like animation, in favor of easy-to-produce long-form content - podcasts, let's plays, vlogs, and the like. Animators got very outraged by this, and I made the point (not back then but in that post) that by relying on a big corporation's money algorithms, they were ultimately leaving themselves wide open to being screwed. I was thinking about it again today, and now I would go as far as to say it was practically inevitable that they were going to get fucked because their income came primarily from ads, and in this post I'm going to try to explain why.
But first, an experiment - take a second to think of the greatest, most important and personally affecting works of art you've seen - any books, movies, games, shows, etc. that you believe have made a real impact on your life. (For real, think about it.) What was primary source of income there? Were they selling the product itself, a subscription service, taking donations, getting government funding, running ads, or something else?
Here's what I came up with:
A few books I really like - the money comes from selling the actual book.
A few movies I really like - the money probably came from theater screenings mostly
A few video games - all the type that you buy upfront and not the free-to-play microtransaction-y kind
A lot of albums - (before the 2000s there was probably some money in album sales, but in recent years musicians make the bulk of their money through touring, so some of each)
A few lectures - either paid for by a conference or given pro bono
One podcast - has a paywall (ad-free though!)
One comic strip - ran in newspapers back when those existed, so the money came from some mix of newspaper subscriptions, ads, and book sales. Don't know what the predominant source of income was
One show - ran on cable tv, which runs on ads
So at least for me personally, when it comes to "how does great art get funded," advertising is not getting a lot of representation. And yet, a pretty big chunk of the media I consume is ad-driven. What gives?
Generally speaking, why are movies better than tv?
Why are books better than magazines?
Why are albums better than turning on the radio?
Why is netflix better than cable?
Why is nearly everything better than those stupid videos on facebook?
Why does advertising seem to turn everything it touches into a more vapid, cheaper, shittier version of itself?
Unlike some anti-advertising crusaders, I don't think ads are inherently evil or unethical. If you have something important to share with the world - so important that you're willing to drop a few thousand just to shove it in some people's faces, I think you should be able to do that. But the unfortunate reality of ad-based income is that there are just these weird consequences that seem to consistently poison content. Here are the ones that I'm aware of:
1. The more ads you can hit someone with, the more profitable the content is. This is why long-form serial content is more desirable in the eyes of money-people at youtube - quantity is more valuable than quality. The content still has to be good enough to get people to engage with it, but this lends itself to factory-produced, rinse & repeat clickbait-y productions. It doesn't matter if the window is minimized and playing in the background while you go do something else - as long as they can stream ads, youtube is happy. And as a subsidiary of a publicly-traded company, they are probably not about to leave money on the table in the name of "prioritizing quality content." For this reason I think it was inevitable that animators, along with all the other internet filmmakers who choose to do elaborate, thoughtful work would get screwed by youtube. It's like a law of physics that everything will always gravitate towards running as many ads as possible. Short-form content that takes a long time to create just doesn't survive in that sort of system.
If you really want to make it on youtube, you have to tailor your work to their systems, and those change constantly anyway so it is possibly a giant waste of time to begin with.
2. The audience did not pay for it, and therefore the creator is less obligated to deliver a worthwhile experience. If someone pays $60 for a video game and it sucks, they'll feel pretty ripped off, and so there is a whole category of journalism dedicated to telling you whether or not a game is worth paying for. Same thing exists in film, literature, and music. This sort of thing doesn't exist in spaces of free content - save for "likes" there's no culture surrounding the evaluation of quality. Even though there should be! We are paying with our attention and our time, and my time is currently worth 15-19 USD an hour!
I can't say I have any kind of hard evidence for this point, but as someone who has experience creating things, I completely believe that people will care less about their work if there isn't an imperative to fulfill a social contract. Back when I made flash games if someone wrote a bad review saying the game didn't work, I would generally take on an attitude of "hm that sucks, well whatever fuck off I barely know how to program anyway." This would be pretty inappropriate if this was a product I sold to someone on steam, and I would probably genuinely feel bad.
3. Being beholden to advertisers puts limitations on what you can say. In this day and age, saying anything too controversial can get an angry mob reporting you to your advertisers asking them to drop you*, and you also would probably want to play it safe when talking about anything related to the product you're doing your ad reads for. There's a podcast I like where the hosts just constantly shit on web technologies and startup culture and they probably would not be able to do that if they were taking checks from squarespace. You certainly wouldn't be able to say any of what I'm saying here if you were also running ads. (That said, Newgrounds still runs some ads, so go buy a Supporter Upgrade and maybe Tom will forgive me for posting this to the front page of his website)
This would not too big of a deal if we were still getting paid to make cartoons, but I can imagine this has a much more insidious effect on unedited content (aka the exact kind of thing advertisers like, see 1). When people are broadcasting live, or just want to have to do minimal edits to their recording, they have to internalize a sort of self-censorship where they just avoid certain topics completely, and are not interested in pushing social and political boundaries (aka the exact kind of content these media seem to be best suited for).
I think restrictions can inspire some creativity, but when everyone is bound to exactly the same restrictions, it's like putting boundaries on the entirety of an artistic medium and that sort of thing usually sucks.
I was thinking of adding a fourth point about how doing a squarespace read just makes you sound like a shill and how that can subconsciously erode the trust between you and the audience, but there's nothing inherent to advertising that turns you into that sort of liar. There's a correlation between bad content and disingenuous ad reads for sure, but I don't think it's the ads that are causing the content to be worse, so I'll save that one.
Now am I saying that all art has to aspire to be "great, important and personally affecting"?
No... I think there's a place in this world for junk food, but I know there are a lot of young people out there who are aspiring to do really great work, and if they're raised in a bubble of ad-funded content they might not realize how destructive ads are to great art. Further, I think most of the work we're exposed to now is the cheap, ad-driven kind, and it sucks that that's taking up most of the attention-space. There's probably a lot of really great and inspired stuff being made, but we're not seeing it because it's not as profitable as the cheap stuff, and that just sucks for everyone.
Am I saying that creators have to immediately stop running ads on everything?
Also no, but I think it's worth bringing all this up because we don't really have a good alternative yet. It seems like patreon is working out for some people, but it's not perfect. I tried my own thing a while ago but stopped doing that when I got a "real job" that's paid for by ads. I feel pretty shitty about my ad-based livelihood so thank you for not mentioning it. Here's a real pie-in-the-sky idea I had today - what if we had a "premium internet" like how satellite/cable is supposed to be better than antenna TV, and you pay some monthly fee to get a subscription to all the quality-curated websites, and the money is distributed to the ones you actually like or something. Any billionaires want to work with me on this???
If you have any ideas on how to fund content better I'm all ears. If Andrew Yang money ever becomes real then that will solve all of this shit and art will just be unprecedentedly amazing because we could all stop worrying about paying rent. That would be nice.
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I was channeling this talk for most of this blog post, so if you thought this was interesting maybe you'll like hearing Jon Blow talk about how microtransactions poison video games. I might listen to it again now to make sure I didn't just lift anything from him verbatim.
* I made a point about this on twitter a while ago - most of us seem to be on the same page that big corporations only really do things in their own interest and are generally selfish and evil, and yet we are effectively tattling to coca-cola when someone does something we don't like. Shouldn't they be the last people we trust with the power to make big decisions about ethics and acceptable censorship?
Why do sponsors think it reflects badly on them if their ad plays before some questionable user-uploaded content? Like we know coca-cola is not sponsoring nazis. we know the preroll ad and the actual video are completely separate entities. Why are they so worried???
VibrantMan
"this unexplainable and sudden urge to consume mcnuggets washes over you"