[Adium-devl] Monetizing Adium

[Peter Hosey]

On Apr 5, 2012, at 12:21:30, Colin Barrett wrote:
> It would not be harmless. Filling relevant, quality ads is hard work, and not doing it would mean putting irrelevant, poor quality ads in a product which has been free to use and ad-free for ten years.

And ads just suck anyway.

“If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.” —Andrew Lewis[1]

He was talking about preferential content (Digg preferring submissions from corporations over submissions from users), but it applies equally, if not moreso, to advertising.

Advertisers these days are not very interested in just sending you an ad to have it run everywhere. They want the maximum return on their investment, which means they'd prefer to show the ad to only those people who will bite (or know someone else who will). This is targeted advertising.

The upside of targeted advertising is more relevant ads: I don't have to see ads for feminine napkins or football games. The downside is that users pay a price in privacy: somehow, the ad platform—if not the advertisers themselves—would have to learn what you're interested in to learn whose ads to show you (assuming we'd have enough ads to make such choices).

There are two ways to do that. One would be to ask the user to fill out a long and invasive form—asking them, up front, to sacrifice their privacy so we can make a buck. That's the forthright way. The other would be to have Adium read the user's messages and attempt to guess their interests from them. That would be taking their privacy ourselves—the sneaky, scummy way.

The minute we put in ads, we send the message that we no longer care about our users' privacy. That it is for sale, as we are for sale.

As long as Adium stands for the user's privacy, Adium should never have ads.

> I don't mean to be harsh, but this isn't ever happening.

Seconded.

[1]: http://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent#3256046