The Slow and Sure Monetization of Everything
How we squandered the promise of a boundless knowledge haven
When the internet first entered homes, there was a wide-eyed optimism that surrounded it. It had the potential to democratize all of human knowledge, after all. For free, we could have each learned anything that there was to know without consequence. In those earliest days, and in our loftiest visions, the internet could have remained an ad-free frontier. Profit might never have entered into the equation at all.
But now looking back on the days of an ad-free internet experience feels like a distant memory. It’s hard to believe there was a time we could visit our websites and chat with our friends and read our information without even a single banner ad or message from sponsors.
It wasn’t long ago that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat were all completely devoid of advertisements. To think back on it now might bring feelings of longing for the humble days of Facebook pokes and an Instagram that centered around photos and not Kardashians.
But as times changed, the paradigm shifted.
“The next 100 years are going to be different for advertisers starting today,” explained Facebook CEO and creator Mark Zuckerburg one fateful Tuesday in 2007. “For the last 100 years media has been pushed out by people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation,” he continued.
And then in 2008, Facebook officially allowed commercial entities to set up pages. With 2009 came the ability to “target” users with ads catered directly to their interests. 2010 brought with it the “Like” button, and the birth of a billion crippling dopamine addictions. 2012 allowed advertisers “Cookies,” granting them the means to retarget the users who’d visited their websites. And now in 2023, after every three posts you’ll invariably find another ad or piece of sponsored content. The same can be said of Instagram, which Facebook bought back in 2012.
Twitter followed a similar path. It started off as an ad-free enterprise built strictly for the good of its users. It remained that way for years. It wasn’t until April of 2010 that they began “promoting” Tweets. Months later, “Promoted Trends” emerged, granting advertisers their own specific hashtags to drum up publicity. Only weeks later, “Promoted Accounts” began surfacing. By only 2013, sponsored content had reshaped its entire landscape irreversibly.
Later that year, they introduced “Conversion Tracking,” giving advertisers more comprehensive insight into how well their marketing strategies were working. Then emerged “Twitter Analytics” and “Website Retargeting” and “Objective-Based Campaigns” and “Tailored Audiences” and ten more jargon-based terms you’d likely need a degree in computer science to properly understand.
YouTube, too, spent its first years as a completely ad-free service. As influencer culture began and the platform started accruing a mass of users and videos, a comparable shift took place. Advertisements were introduced, and then they grew longer. With time, fewer and fewer of them could be skipped. The ads even got better at disguising themselves as entertainment so it would be harder for users to discern the transition. And it worked.
What it was to use the internet in 2007 had grown into something completely unrecognizable by fifteen years later. Today, it’s difficult to be online without the aching sense that each and every person and business and entity of every sort is trying to make money off of you in some way or another. The global amount spent on advertisement has gone up nearly double digit percentage points each year for the last decade, and by 2024 that number is expected to exceed a trillion dollars for the first time.
What few services remain free invade our privacy so thoroughly that it would have caused us to throw our phones into walls in those early digital days. But with the proliferation of advertisements has come the gradual acceptance that none of our activity is private.
The conversations I have in my personal messages I can be sure will find their way into my targeted ads. The conversations I have in private with my loved ones will, too.
The invasions of privacy are so colossal that they needed to be imposed gradually. In 2007, the phone that listens to you and caters its shopping suggestions around what it hears would have simply been too much for the world to accept. But the digital revolution never faltered or slowed for even a moment. In the avalanche of all of it, our privacy going out the window sounded only as a frail whimper.
The battle for an internet that worked in humanity’s interest has been largely lost. While the promise of infinite information at our fingertips has remained alive, it’s come at an almost dystopian price. We’ve ushered in a world so toxically centered around money that it practically makes Wall Street look tame by comparison. On every website we visit we’re being preyed upon.
The big Youtubers each have their sponsors and unspoken agendas and their droning ads for NordVPN and SquareSpace in each of their videos. Their content follows the ads which Youtube already incorporates into the beginning of nearly every video that its users watch. And if the video is long enough, YouTube will bombard us with more ads in the middle of it. They’ll continue slowly whittling each of us down until more and more simply cave and buy YouTube Premium. So far they’ve gotten 80 million paid users, nearly doubling its count since only 13 months prior, according to Alphabet’s latest earnings report.
To spend a few minutes on any social media platform today is to be roped along from video to video and post to post in a near-zombified daze. Facebook sends me down odd rabbit holes of content designed specifically to captivate and little else. Informing people is secondary; the videos I see in my feed are decided by what their algorithms have calculated will keep me scrolling for the very longest.
Snapchat decided it could make more money in the ad arena if they unveiled a news feature within their app. So in 2015 they launched a “Discover” ability to show users content from brands like ESPN, CNN and Vice. Initially it seemed to have promise.
But it didn’t take long for the promise of real news to be quietly replaced by celebrity gossip and tabloid videos when they were likely discovered more profitable. Now, a quick glance at the Discover page lands me looking at thumbnails for videos called “Epstein’s Island List is Going Viral,” “Animal Substance Turning People Into Zombies,” “Men Never Talk About This,” and “He is Suing Her For $200,000.” The content is almost invariably recycled bad information that can be found elsewhere 80% less punctuated by advertisements. Minute long videos here will sometimes have three separate ad breaks within them.
And as all of these ads everywhere have grown more and more prevalent, they’ve learned to adapt better and better to the evolving landscape of social media. With TikTok exploding in popularity in recent years, advertisers decided to capitalize on it by further blurring the line between what’s entertainment and what’s being sold. Distinguishing between Reels, TikToks and commercials is growing more challenging.
It’s gotten to the point where nearly all available content on the internet seems maliciously steeped in ulterior motives. From each streaming service to each social media platform, to each and every predatory membership practice of every conglomerate, there’s just no escaping it anymore. Everyone wants our money. And in those rare instances that they don’t, they want our information.
They want to know which websites we visit and how often we visit them, and how best that information can be used to deliver us the ads we’ll find most enticing. There’s a growing list of Black Mirror episodes rooted in brighter realities.
The companies that know everything about us are each in cahoots with one another. So now if I want Hulu, it comes free with my Spotify account. Or was it my Target rewards membership that gave me my Paramount+? There’s no keeping track of it all. They hope for our lapsed payments so they can hit us with additional charges. They count on our confusion. It’s how our family ended up paying inexplicably for three simultaneous Amazon Prime accounts. That they were unwilling to reimburse us when we discovered that perhaps goes without saying.
While I’d like to be optimistic about what the future ahead could look like here, my hopes aren’t high. It’s difficult for me to envision the future in which we don’t keep carving out more and more digital terrain to profiteer. It’s hard to imagine that advertisers won’t buy more ads, and that the ads they buy won’t keep growing longer and more insidious in their nature.
It’s hard to imagine we’d put up with it, but we’re already wading through far more nonsense than we ever intended to. Just so long as the change is gradual, a couple of decades from now we might just be signing onto social media apps where all of our friends have been unceremoniously replaced by AI-produced TikToks. If the cards are played right, we might not even notice what’s changed.