Social Media Is One Big Ad

Hey Jessocialites

Believe it or not, but there was a time social media was cool, it was a place where you could go hang out with your friend's banter about anything, and you know you make it your own. Eventually, big business came in and commodified it to a point where social media sites leverage all its user's free labour, dumping hours of content on their servers and then monetising it for their gain.

Social media is the business of attention, and the more time you spend viewing and contributing for FREE, the more these sites earn. At this point, they've got a steady stream of suckers willing to work hard and put in the hours to try and extract value for themselves through followers and their income streams, but for every minute of use, the platform gets paid.

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Upfront ads

We all know the usual banner ads, sponsored posts and all that jazz, it's what we were running away from in the web Two world as it became more and more intrusive and using your data to chase you around the web. Upfront ads make up for the biggest part of the platform's revenue, but it is by no means the biggest driver of traffic or time on site.

Social media sites need to strike a balance between ads and content, but why do that when you can masquerade ads as content.

Not so apparent ads

Many of the influencers you follow, articles you read, blogs you share are all ads contributing to the ecosystem to try and drive you to consume and sell your time to them for a fee. Each blog post view pays the writer, each affiliate link in an article pays the writer, what is seen as organic content is just an ad hiding in plain sight.

You may be adblocking the native ads, but the passive ads are what sticks in your mind, force you to look at it for an extended time, bookmark articles, do further research, actively go searching for the product and get you into their ad web over time.

How do I know this? Because I do it for a living and we as marketers are getting increasingly better at manipulating users to do what we want. We've hired guns; we don't think much of users, we only look at traffic, conversions and how we can improve it.

It's never about the user, we pretend, its digital sheep herding, leading you and your credit card to the slaughter.

The ad feedback loop

Social media has created the perfect echo chamber for consumerism. In a world where time has no value (according to interest rates), we would rather give our time away to vanity metrics such as likes, shares and comments.

Blockchain social media needs to understand this, and leverage the power of the ad world to absorb all this value, take all this free labour and turn it into an ecosystem that has far more entry points.

Until users realise they are the commodity, they won't know how to market their services and discover their value.