They have 900m users and 50m of them are paying.
Ads are inevitable. Surprised they put them on a paid plan user like you, but they are IPO'ing this year and need to show the best numbers possible.
Not at all. They could even be prohibited by law, as evidenced by prohibitions of some ads being common in most jurisdictions and the Clean City Law of São Paulo.
One of the grand old men of modern advertising said that "man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard", and suggested that he would eventually turn to covert militant direct action against it. I suspect that he would have extended this to screen ads if he had lived long enough to experience them.
The advertisers spend money on those ads, but they know the audience doesn't want to pay.. but fortunately, their products might be free too, because they can also be funded by ads (served to the same audience).
This intelligent design provides infinite money and infinite growth!
> There’s a reason the advertising industry exists.
I think we'd need to pause online ads to understand their true effect.. I know people buy things, but attributing these choices to the fact that an ad was displayed to the same user some days ago doesn't sound reliable to me.
That is... not interesting. That is how the ad supported web worked for the past 20 years.
- scams and fraud
- misattribution
- advertisers that don't actually care about the ROI
Enshittification is inevitable.
Interesting how those two sentences are directly aligned. I hate ad culture.