Please Stop Working on Ads

The flipside of 1. is that people in Africa still need to get internet access, which is not free. So one way or another they are paying for email. You could make the same case for cellphones, yet competition and innovation is driving adoption around the world. I'm not convinced that an ad-supported model is "cheaper" for those people. Furthermore, it only works because their number is not high enough to incur a substantial cost. If it did, given that the purchasing power of those people is negligible, Google's fiduciary duty to its shareholders would be an incentive to degrade the service, make them pay, etc.

Please stop writing posts that tell people to stop writing articles that tell people to stop working on ads.

Weeing all over kittens is the new old.

You discussed none of the points in the article. This is likely to result in downvotes. (Did you even read it ?)

The author doesn't seem to understand WHY companies want to advertise on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. (Facebook makes $4B a year on advertising, so we're not talking about an insignificant amount of money here.)

That's really the most important part. These are the companies spending their money. Why do they want to "waste" their money on those sites if as the author states nobody goes there to buy things.

Two reasons: 1) That's where people are. People spend 8 hours a month[1] on Facebook out of an average of 32 total hours a month[2] online - 25%. A company would be stupid not to want to be seen there. I'm sorry, but if your business is selling things to the average consumer, the average consumer is on Facebook. They go there to be social with their customers, friend, like, share, and follow. That leads me to my second point...

2) It's not about selling (right now). The OP makes a huge assumption that ads lead to clicks lead to sales. Ever seen a TV ad? Do you think TV viewers stop watching the program to run to the store to buy Tide? No. It's about branding, having a marketing message and making sure everyone sees it. The 30-second elevator pitch. Then when they ARE in the mood to buy, when they ARE in the store, they think about your product. "Hey, I need a new X soon, maybe I should check out product Y I've been hearing about."

I can certainly see how people can think "there's no intent to buy" on Facebook and Twitter and maybe that's often true, but that's not even the point. And ad-supported businesses will always always exist although it might not be the best model for you.

[1] http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/wasting-time-on-facebook/ [2] http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/online-time

The consumer packaged goods industry generates two TRILLION dollars a year in the US, by selling us things we don't think we need, through branding and marketing. Bottled water is an entire industry that was built on selling us plastic bottles filled with an abundantly free resource by convincing us we needed it through, you guessed it: advertising.

There are many, many industries that rely on brand awareness to sell there goods. There is an amazing quote which I unfortunately couldn't find that goes something like this:

  "In order to reach the small segment of the population 
  that is interested in buying Mercedes, everyone in the
  world must know what our brand stands for."

Ads with intent drive clear, immediate ROI, but they can only ever capture the segment of the market that know what they want. Display ads on the web may not be the future of advertising, but it isn't going to go away, even if cable TV died tomorrow. In fact, the very fact that this discussion keeps coming up makes it pretty clear that there is a huge opportunity to innovate in this market. Maybe the advice should be: don't build a business that runs on static display ads, do try to find an innovative ad model that engages users and works for brands. Ads, for example, like the interactive old spice ad on vimeo. Immediate ROI? No. Massive brand awareness? Absolutely.

http://vimeo.com/47875656