I mean, you could call it "the game," or you could look at it from the perspective of audiences: Instead of conducting user research to meet audience needs and build a product that serves human needs and makes audiences want to pay, tech companies prefer to sell ads on a product that makes audiences addicted to watching.
Media and tech companies alike insist that "audiences won't pay," but these are the same media and tech companies who have been run by the same (predominantly white, male) executive class for a CENTURY-- the class that does absolutely zero product research and only cares about rapid returns on their investment. The only way they can think of to rapid scale is to sell advertising that fuels addictive (or, in the "nice" way of marketers, habit-forming) products. It's this cycle of Babbittry where we replicate the same problems ad nauseaum, and audiences become more and more angry and dissatisfied.
All I'm saying is, throwing up your hands and saying "advertising is the only solution hyuck" is about the least creative business solution one can offer. I wish that people on both the advertising side and the executive side thought, like, marginally outside the box.
I mean, you could call it "the game," or you could look at it from the perspective of audiences: Instead of conducting user research to meet audience needs and build a product that serves human needs and makes audiences want to pay, tech companies prefer to sell ads on a product that makes audiences addicted to watching.
Media and tech companies alike insist that "audiences won't pay," but these are the same media and tech companies who have been run by the same (predominantly white, male) executive class for a CENTURY-- the class that does absolutely zero product research and only cares about rapid returns on their investment. The only way they can think of to rapid scale is to sell advertising that fuels addictive (or, in the "nice" way of marketers, habit-forming) products. It's this cycle of Babbittry where we replicate the same problems ad nauseaum, and audiences become more and more angry and dissatisfied.
All I'm saying is, throwing up your hands and saying "advertising is the only solution hyuck" is about the least creative business solution one can offer. I wish that people on both the advertising side and the executive side thought, like, marginally outside the box.