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0 sats \ 6 replies \ @lawndough 21 Sep 2023 \ on: The Origins of Value 4 Value as Far as I Can Tell bitcoin
This may be a dumb, but aren’t buying and selling ads a form of value for value?
Publishers give “attention value” to advertisers.
Advertisers give “money value” to publishers.
This provides steady income for publishers so they aren’t relying on the goodwill of anonymous internet users that may or may not pay them.
While it sounds good on paper, I don’t see how the “let people pay what they want” V4V model could be applied to real businesses.
Yes, but that is a different v4v model from No Agenda. Any trade/commerce is value for value as long as there isn't a third party forcing one or both of the parties. At the core v4v is just free trade.
The incentives are different with the "traditional" ad model. With this model you are incentivized to keep advertisers happy. This is why ad driven platforms are so corporate and "safe". The term used in the ad industry is "brand safe". With the v4v model the incentives are to keep the audience happy. With the ad model the audience is the product. When the v4v model the product is the product.
I think there will always be a place for the ad model but it has downsides. Very large ones.
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It's interesting to think that "audience capture" might be considered a downside of V4V. There was a great article I read about this ... here it is. You see this everywhere these days. It's like the micro version of the perverted incentives from advertising, except way more granular. And of course, the way audience capture works in practice is enabled, at a higher layer, by advertising.
Such a complicated web of forces. The main takeaway -- or at least, my takeaway -- is that here, as everywhere, there is no real 'fix' for anything perverse. You nudge the system one way, and now there's another failure mode. To pass the time I play around in my mind about what new failure modes btc unlocks.
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There are no solutions, only trade-offs
~ Thomas Sowell
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Didn't read the article but I'm familiar with the story. It is indeed an issue but rather one of not having core values and self respect. You could be a wore for ads or audience. Or both! Many such examples.
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I think the whole lesson is that "core values and self respect" are eroded, little by little, by the forces around us, whether that's being surrounded by assholes, advertising, or even pandering to your V4V audience. Nobody escapes that influence, though people vary in the degree to which the same pressures affect them.
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That’s true. I guess the challenge is finding an audience that is willing to pay for the product with real money, not just their attention. I think Mash is doing a lot to make it feasible, I just don’t know if a majority of people want to pay for content when they’re perfectly happy to see ads and get it for “free.”
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