Business & Technology Related Musings: Death To The Advertising Driven Internet (App.Net)

OK, so maybe the title of this post is a bit extreme. In the abstract I don't have any problem with advertising. It's been a perfectly legitimate way for companies to get their story out and has provided a means for media outlets to pay the majority of their bills and make a profit for hundreds of years. Having said that, I'm not very happy with the advertising driven Internet. Primarily because of the impact it has had on privacy.

Demographic data has been available to advertisers for a long time now. Knowing the socio economic background of the readers of a particular type of media provided advertisers with the ability to target their advertising campaigns in a way that was likely to maximize the return on the dollars they were investing. The problem comes in when that infomation goes from being based on groups of people and starts being available down to the level of individuals. The Internet makes gathering and inferring that kind of data much easier than it has ever been before.

Google has made a fortune providing advertisers with the opportunity to target ads towards very specific types of customers. Sometimes I find that useful but there are also times I find it creepy which is why I've been hoping some sort of alternative to the advertising driven Internet would emerge. I like having options.

All businesses have customers and most people would probably assume that people who use Google's search and other services are their customers. This is not the case. Google's customers are the people who provide the revenue that allows them to maintain and grow their business; in other words, advertisers. Companies that want to stay in business need to keep their customers happy. Generally this isn't a problem. Where the issue comes in here is that there is a financial incentive for Google to make their advertisers happy and making advertisers happy can lead to a place where most of us feel our privacy has been violated.

Google is not unique and I don't mean to pick on them. I could say the same things about Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter and many others.

Given all that I was excited to see there is a new social networking site that is in the early testing phase that is being built on a totally different business model, one in which developers and users are the customer rather than advertisers. Listed among their core values is the following...

We are selling our product, NOT our users.

We will never sell your personal data, content, feed, interests, clicks, or anything else to advertisers. We promise.

There are several more statements along the same line that point out the value of having the customers be the end users and developers who create extensions to their core platform rather than advertisers. More can be found at https://join.app.net/

It's hard not to see Twitter as the first potential victim of this effort given the look and feel of the current early alpha interface along with the changes Twitter has been making and the developer discontent those changes have caused.

App.Net seems to be doing well in the early going and has raised over eight hundred thousand dollars in a very short period of time. they are also getting some press which is always a good sign. Ultimately though the question is will enough people be willing to pay for such a service in large enough numbers to make their business model viable? I certainly hope so but time will tell.

(Photo credit: Will Lion)