You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Poll: Would You Like if Steemit Sold Advertising and Shared the Revenue with Us?
Steemit.com is very nice without the advertisements but if they want to continue growth and serve users around the world with standard web response times, the infrastructure costs are going to go up and up.
Thanks for your insights bellsx1! So tell me, has Steemit had issues with web response times? Has this been an issue for people? Are you based outside the US and having slow web response times?
The problem with ads are the highest paying ads are going to want targeting. Targeting means online profiling. Profiling means alienating the core cryptocurrency crowd who got steemit on its feet.
The Brave browser is looking to solve this issue specifically with their browser attention tokens which plan to use local browser based profiling for ad targeting. It would not surprise me to see the steemit developers work specifically on a similar solution. Perhaps EOS is meant to host a solution to this problem. I am only speculating on whether the steem developers are working towards a solution on this specific problem.
I do not know if steemit has had problems with response times. Being outside of the US makes the internet slow for some people and faster for others, so that in itself is not a problem. But if you set up cdns and servers to cache the site for access from different global locations that starts to cost money. There are p2p ways to achieve this now and the steemit crew is probably aware of them.
This is probably the most interesting response on this thread so far. Ok, let's take a step back for a minute. Help me understand something here. You say that targeting means online profiling, this is true and I understand that. But how would profiling alienate us? That's the part I'm confused about...do you really feel alienated when you google "airfare to Hawaii" and the next day when you login to Nytimes.com, you see ads for travel deals to Hawaii? Second, isn't is possible to do non-targeted ads? Obviously they are less effective and generate less revenue, but they could still make money perhaps, with zero alienation involved.
Sure... The potential for exploitation exists should that saved profiling data ever be breached by an internal or external threat and used for anything other than ad serving.