How is raising prices for ads part of enshittification and why is charging more for ad space framed as underhanded? Would the platform be better if the ads were cheaper?
Just very confused by that part. The business guys would simply stop paying for ads if they thought it was too expensive.
Enshittification is described by Cory Doctorow as squeezing the users and then the business partners. Basically as the company grows it’s influence it can treat everyone worse and they can’t leave. As users we’re familiar with it well, but it happens to the business partners as well in the way the comic shows
Business partners, not people putting up ads. Something like a platform becoming dominant (like apple, Spotify, Amazon, Microsoft or steam for example) and then forcing anyone who is selling stuff via the platform to pay an increasing cut to them. Competitors can try to push them out with better models for those using the app to sell goods or services but it takes a lot to remove you from that position.
Paying for advertising space never comes into the picture.
Yeah, but the thing here is ad space, not vital infrastructure. The ads are part of the enshittification, charging more for them doesn’t make the platform worse.
It makes the platform worse for anyone with something to promote which includes your small business tyrants but also includes animal shelters trying to find someone to adopt a dog, your local bridge club tournament, the pub down the street promoting your friend’s band playing a show etc
I was involved in running some non-profit community events and watched the enshittification in real time. It once was perfectly possible to promote events with just organic reach then overtime became necessary to spend a little bit of money to reach anyone outside the network of followers until eventually even the people who had explicitly opted in to liking our pages and joining our groups would not even be notified of events unless we paid an extortionate amount.
Just gonna throw out that I’ve never seen an ad for a local bridge tournament, your friends rock band playing a show etc as a paid ad (which the top post is about). It is the same people that are ‘pushing ads’ on the users that are being ‘squeezed’.
Posting about it and getting it shared is a different thing, and you’re describing in the second paragraph isn’t about paid advertising, it is raising a fee for access (like the blue check mark on twitter for example). Part 2 where ‘business partners’ come in to pay for ads is where that system is already dying since they will promote the ads over organic content leading to what you describe. The people paying for the ads being charged more isn’t the issue, the issue is that the ads are there in the first place.
You probably haven’t seen paid ads for those things recently. You’ve almost certainly seen them in the years past whether you realized it or not unless you were just not on social media around the time it was actually affordable (like around 2013 putting in even $10 could get a decent response resulting in people actually showing up where as by 2018 you could piss away hundreds just to hear crickets, probably worse now but I’m out of the game).
The distinction you are trying to make is one that only existed in the distant past of chronological timelines where ads were an interjection into the natural flow of posts, ever since algorithmic timelines took over there is no such distinction anymore it’s all just shit trying to compete for attention.
Ads are shit but ads existing is not in of itself enshittification. Enshittification isn’t just about things sucking because of capitalism (it’s not even an anti-capitalist concept) but a specific process by which a captive market is created exploiting each class in turn. You need to read about enshittification from the source on pluralistic.net instead of trying to reverse engineer it from webcomics.
Advertisers are among the business partners who are catered to in the second stage of the enshittification cycle, and who get squeezed in the third. Charging more for ads makes the platform worse for them, without helping or further harming the captive users who got squeezed in stage 2.
Ads become less useful? How are cheap ads more useful?
No business has been bankrupted by increased ad fees, that is a simple win loss calculation. It isn’t vital for any business other than the ones that produce ads, but they are going to continue producing ads either way unless the platform loses all advertising in which case it will lower the fees or simply hemorrage money.
Advertising is wasteful, harmful and annoying. It has negative social utility. No sane economic system would have an entire industry dedicated to manipulating people into buying stuff.
But we don’t live under a rational economic system, we live under capitalism. In many industries, especially the consumer-oriented ones, advertising is a necessary cost of doing business. You need to advertise to make customers aware of your existence and to induce demand for your products and services.
The near-monopoly of advertising platforms such as Google and Facebook means that they act as gatekeepers between businesses and the market and buying advertising space is a form of rent businesses have to pay to the platforms.
When the price of advertising increases, the rate of profit of advertisers decrease, just like when landlords increase the rent of physical space. If that margin gets too thin the business becomes unviable. If a business don’t do advertising they don’t get enough revenue to stay viable. It is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.
Price gouging done by platforms to advertisers is a textbook example of the tendency of capital to concentrate. Capitalists are not only extracting profit by exploiting labour, they are also seeking to extract profits from eachother and when you get to a position like that of Google or Facebook, your ability to do that is immense.
There are no good guys in the advertising market but that doesn’t mean that the big crooks are not bleeding the smaller crooks dry.
The enshittification was already in full swing by the point wheee Google was pushing paid advertising to the top, charging more for it didn’t change the dynamic. The argument was already lost before they increased ad fees.
I don’t understand how the allocation of ads is supposed to work any other way than hiking prices until the breaking point, speaking of tendencies. If it cost 5 cents to publish ads it would either result in being close to useless if you are only allowed one ad per company or big companies flooding it with a huge amount of 5 cent ads giving the same result as the price hike.
The fundamental problem is the ads themselves (or capitalism if you wanna push it that far) forcing people to pay for exposure that would otherwise be organic. I think hiking ad fees might be the single worst example you could give of ‘treating business partners badly’ in this context.
Just because it is “supposed” to work this way doesn’t make it friendlier to the people being priced out of ads. But if you want another example of enshittification, intentional algorithm and platform twiddling by Facebook has killed businesses. One day they’re pushing social games like Farmville, and the next, without warning, these games are stuffed. One day they’re pushing celebrity headlines, and overnight, buzzfeed-likes see their viewership decimated.
Yes, all of these things suck for the consumer either way, but enshittification makes it suck for the business partners too. It’s not a comfort to an advertiser that they’re supposed to be eaten by bigger fish, and it doesn’t make it any less ironic that a platform that was once there for consumers and businesses now apparently offers nobody anything but is impossible to leave nonetheless.
How is raising prices for ads part of enshittification and why is charging more for ad space framed as underhanded? Would the platform be better if the ads were cheaper?
Just very confused by that part. The business guys would simply stop paying for ads if they thought it was too expensive.
Enshittification is described by Cory Doctorow as squeezing the users and then the business partners. Basically as the company grows it’s influence it can treat everyone worse and they can’t leave. As users we’re familiar with it well, but it happens to the business partners as well in the way the comic shows
Business partners, not people putting up ads. Something like a platform becoming dominant (like apple, Spotify, Amazon, Microsoft or steam for example) and then forcing anyone who is selling stuff via the platform to pay an increasing cut to them. Competitors can try to push them out with better models for those using the app to sell goods or services but it takes a lot to remove you from that position.
Paying for advertising space never comes into the picture.
i take it as one product/company cornering a market or monopolizing and everyone else be damned
Yeah, but the thing here is ad space, not vital infrastructure. The ads are part of the enshittification, charging more for them doesn’t make the platform worse.
It makes the platform worse for anyone with something to promote which includes your small business tyrants but also includes animal shelters trying to find someone to adopt a dog, your local bridge club tournament, the pub down the street promoting your friend’s band playing a show etc
I was involved in running some non-profit community events and watched the enshittification in real time. It once was perfectly possible to promote events with just organic reach then overtime became necessary to spend a little bit of money to reach anyone outside the network of followers until eventually even the people who had explicitly opted in to liking our pages and joining our groups would not even be notified of events unless we paid an extortionate amount.
Just gonna throw out that I’ve never seen an ad for a local bridge tournament, your friends rock band playing a show etc as a paid ad (which the top post is about). It is the same people that are ‘pushing ads’ on the users that are being ‘squeezed’.
Posting about it and getting it shared is a different thing, and you’re describing in the second paragraph isn’t about paid advertising, it is raising a fee for access (like the blue check mark on twitter for example). Part 2 where ‘business partners’ come in to pay for ads is where that system is already dying since they will promote the ads over organic content leading to what you describe. The people paying for the ads being charged more isn’t the issue, the issue is that the ads are there in the first place.
You probably haven’t seen paid ads for those things recently. You’ve almost certainly seen them in the years past whether you realized it or not unless you were just not on social media around the time it was actually affordable (like around 2013 putting in even $10 could get a decent response resulting in people actually showing up where as by 2018 you could piss away hundreds just to hear crickets, probably worse now but I’m out of the game).
The distinction you are trying to make is one that only existed in the distant past of chronological timelines where ads were an interjection into the natural flow of posts, ever since algorithmic timelines took over there is no such distinction anymore it’s all just shit trying to compete for attention.
Ads are shit but ads existing is not in of itself enshittification. Enshittification isn’t just about things sucking because of capitalism (it’s not even an anti-capitalist concept) but a specific process by which a captive market is created exploiting each class in turn. You need to read about enshittification from the source on pluralistic.net instead of trying to reverse engineer it from webcomics.
Advertisers are among the business partners who are catered to in the second stage of the enshittification cycle, and who get squeezed in the third. Charging more for ads makes the platform worse for them, without helping or further harming the captive users who got squeezed in stage 2.
the point being the ads become less useful, return less on the investment but the price continues to rise because… monopoly
Ads become less useful? How are cheap ads more useful?
No business has been bankrupted by increased ad fees, that is a simple win loss calculation. It isn’t vital for any business other than the ones that produce ads, but they are going to continue producing ads either way unless the platform loses all advertising in which case it will lower the fees or simply hemorrage money.
Advertising is wasteful, harmful and annoying. It has negative social utility. No sane economic system would have an entire industry dedicated to manipulating people into buying stuff.
But we don’t live under a rational economic system, we live under capitalism. In many industries, especially the consumer-oriented ones, advertising is a necessary cost of doing business. You need to advertise to make customers aware of your existence and to induce demand for your products and services.
The near-monopoly of advertising platforms such as Google and Facebook means that they act as gatekeepers between businesses and the market and buying advertising space is a form of rent businesses have to pay to the platforms.
When the price of advertising increases, the rate of profit of advertisers decrease, just like when landlords increase the rent of physical space. If that margin gets too thin the business becomes unviable. If a business don’t do advertising they don’t get enough revenue to stay viable. It is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.
Price gouging done by platforms to advertisers is a textbook example of the tendency of capital to concentrate. Capitalists are not only extracting profit by exploiting labour, they are also seeking to extract profits from eachother and when you get to a position like that of Google or Facebook, your ability to do that is immense.
There are no good guys in the advertising market but that doesn’t mean that the big crooks are not bleeding the smaller crooks dry.
The enshittification was already in full swing by the point wheee Google was pushing paid advertising to the top, charging more for it didn’t change the dynamic. The argument was already lost before they increased ad fees.
I don’t understand how the allocation of ads is supposed to work any other way than hiking prices until the breaking point, speaking of tendencies. If it cost 5 cents to publish ads it would either result in being close to useless if you are only allowed one ad per company or big companies flooding it with a huge amount of 5 cent ads giving the same result as the price hike.
The fundamental problem is the ads themselves (or capitalism if you wanna push it that far) forcing people to pay for exposure that would otherwise be organic. I think hiking ad fees might be the single worst example you could give of ‘treating business partners badly’ in this context.
Just because it is “supposed” to work this way doesn’t make it friendlier to the people being priced out of ads. But if you want another example of enshittification, intentional algorithm and platform twiddling by Facebook has killed businesses. One day they’re pushing social games like Farmville, and the next, without warning, these games are stuffed. One day they’re pushing celebrity headlines, and overnight, buzzfeed-likes see their viewership decimated.
Yes, all of these things suck for the consumer either way, but enshittification makes it suck for the business partners too. It’s not a comfort to an advertiser that they’re supposed to be eaten by bigger fish, and it doesn’t make it any less ironic that a platform that was once there for consumers and businesses now apparently offers nobody anything but is impossible to leave nonetheless.