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So, apparently targeted advertsing may be coming to ...

techcrunch.com/2024/12/05/blue

This is not a surprise at all, and has been predicted for a while. Despite the protestations from Bluesky enthusiasts saying that selling domain names was going to do it, the BS business plan never made any sense.

And now they are paying for server costs for 20+ million users and watching their $15M investment from Blockchain Capital et al. dwindle.

Reality bites, and it bites hard.

TechCrunch · Bluesky CEO Jay Graber isn't ruling out advertising | TechCrunchBluesky has blown up this year thanks to a vibrant community of posters, user customization choices, and a decentralized protocol that doesn't lock users

@mastodonmigration they’ve always been careful not to rule out advertising so I doubt anybody there is surprised by this. A lot depends on market conditions when they do their next raise - they were smart to close the $15 M when they did, and my guess is their server costs won’t eat into that too quickly, but then again they’re hiring 100 contract trust and safety people and that might be just the tip of the iceberg. It wouldn’t surprise me if they try some kind of premium subscription before advertising but it’s hard to know far get they can get with that. Time will tell!

@mastodonmigration read what she said carefully. She did get say “no ads”, she said “no ads that enshittify the network”

@mastodonmigration which is what she’s saying now, with “user intent”. Of course it’s one thing to say it, and another to actually do it, but there are enough situations where enough people are ok with ads that it’s not impossible — and there’s no real value in showing ads to people who don’t want to see them, so there business model still works if you implement an easy-to-use opt-out or even opt-in

(Even in that situation, ads are arguably still problematic, so I’m not endorsing that model, I’m just saying that “only ads people want to see “ is a potentially non-enshittifying model, so what they’ve been saying is consistent)

@thenexusofprivacy

There are several ad models that have varying ethical and moral questions associated with them.

Like it has been known forever (foundational late-90s-to-early-00s CRM-style) that if you advertise exclusively to people who opt into your advertising and you target them with what they have asked you to target them with you get excellent results.

I won't say any of them are necessarily good, but they do fit with the statements that have been made so far

@mastodonmigration

@thenexusofprivacy

There are also a lot—a lot a lot—of things you can do that amount to advertising funding you, but _indirectly_. For instance, charging money for the kinds of features that brands like, which then allow brands to better use your plaform, which then itself allows a form of advertising (think Wendy's twitter).

You aren't making money from ads directly, and yet you are still enabling something very much like advertising.

@mastodonmigration