Paying people to read advertisements was tried a few times during the
dotcom boom, and the business model failed every time.
The reason is that there's two kinds of people on the Internet: the ones
with too much time and not enough money, and the ones with enough money but
not enough time.
The second group, the ones with enough money, are the ones that advertisers
want to reach -- they're the ones with money to spend on luxuries and
things, right? But, unfortunately, just about everybody with enough money
doesn't have enough time to do everything they want to do. They certainly
don't have enough time to sit through advertisements, not for the
pennies-per-ad that an advertiser can afford to pay.
The group with enough time to sit through ads are people who don't have any
money to spend on stuff. They're unemployed, and students, and other people
who access the Internet from third-hand Pentium MMX machines at home or
from PCs at the public library. They'll sit through as many advertisements
as people will throw at them, so long as they get paid to do it -- but
advertisers aren't interested in reaching THEM.
(There's a third group, people who don't have enough time OR enough money.
They're working two or three jobs just to get by. But they don't figure
into this discussion -- they've heard of this "Internet" thing and keep
thinking they should give it a try.)
Mitch Wagner
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