Any Platform That Relies on Advertisments As Its Prime Source of Revenue Is Bound To Be Distractful

Advertisement by it’s nature is designed to be interruptive and distractful. When you are perfectly in flow with good, quality content, the ad is interjected to leverage the flow created by the good content. It is designed to catch your attention when you are least expecting your attention to waver.

Advertisement is supposed to be ugly, annoying and an eye-sore so that it can stand out from the rest of the well-designed, well-intended content. Because if it wasn’t an ugly, annoying eye-sore, you’d probably glance over it & ignore it as it doesn’t cause you too much discomfort.

Any platform that uses advertisement as it’s primary source of revenue, whether it be the old tube television or the latest music streaming app, is bound to set up advertisements in a way that deters your attention away from where you’d like it to be.

The platforms will achieve it through coercive design & by forcing the advertisement upon you. This could mean videos that interrupt the program, giant banner ads on a website’s sidebar or a ‘note from the sponsors’ before a podcasts starts.

This is a disservice to the hard-working artist or creator because it makes them meet a rising quality standard in an increasingly competitive field while the platform itself indulges the audience with increasingly louder & distractful advertisements so as to whisk them away to an another commercial platform of the advertiser’s choice.

As more and more creators turn to these platforms which rely on advertisements for their revenue, the end user slowly desensitizes himself from over-exposure. This begins a race to the bottom because now the whole ecosystem turns into a war for the customer’s attention. This leads to clickbait content, increasingly loud ads, more design coercion by the platform and a decrease in audiences’ agency on whether they wish to indulge in these advertisements or not.

Few examples of this are video ads which are becoming unskippable, the repetitive ad which begs you to buy the paid subscription or display advertisements that are embedded in the feed, which you cannot skip unless you stop using the platform in question completely.

As a culture, we need to step away from these platforms which rely on advertisements and start rewarding genuine, individual content creators directly with our wallets because it incentivizes hard-work and creativity instead of gimmicky, click-bait content which is designed keeping the advertisement ecosystem in mind.

The creators whether they be an artist, a musician or a travel vlogger, get a bigger chunk of the revenue too instead of having to rely on pennies which the advertisements throw their way. The direct correlation between quality content & quality earnings will hopefully uplift the entire ecosystem too.

It’s a difficult transition because we’ve so been ruined by content that is initially free-of-cost without realizing that this is the same mechanism used by every single corporate megalith to hook & reel us in. And once they’ve got us, they’ll bleed us dry. Maybe we should keep in mind the adage: “If it’s free, you are the product”