For majority of my childhood and teenage years, this was a digital model I found most frustrating. Why would advertisements of stuff I couldn’t care less about always pop up when I was playing solitaire on my phone?
Changing Attitude
The Online Advertising Model is a business model that for the large part business have to be careful about. Marketers do not want to annoy their target market. However, the attitude towards digital advertising and the online advertising model is changing. Marketers are now advertising products that compliment consumer’s proven interests or recent searches.
HOW?
Businesses need to create digital strategies that are;
- Interactive
- Relevant
- Social appropriate
- Persuasive
- Understand consumer’s interests
I like the advertising model because I recognise that more people will use the service if it is free. e.g. Facebook. Once this free service has build a considerable foundation of users it can expand its revenue through advertisement. Granted the page stays free, there will always be users to advertise to. This business model will need to spend less efforts on retaining their users compared to subscription and freemium models.
In the words of Mark Zuckerberg:
Based on what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals, we create categories—for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain—and then charge advertisers to show ads to that category. Although advertising to specific groups existed well before the internet, online advertising allows much more precise targeting and therefore more-relevant ads.
Source: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/01/understanding-facebooks-business-model/
