Web3 Social Platforms Need Ads Or They Risk Failing

Everyone within the walls of web3 seems to hate ads and talk about how it's great that it doesn't exist on Web3 social platforms.

The sad truth is that absence of ads is the very reason why web3 social platforms will crumble or simply forever remain small.

Objectively speaking, the odds stack up against us as a tokenized web3 social platform when we ignore ads. There isn't an infinite amount of money anyway in the world, hence we cannot keep deceiving ourselves with the notion that we simply need to attract investors and all will be good.

Where inflation exists, investment funds are at risk, the only thing that saves the day is consumer value which can either come directly from consumers spending within an economy or from businesses spending to get the attention of the consumers.

The latter is where advertising revenue comes in and it's rather strange that we've limited our own growth by ignoring the largest segment for generating revenue as a social platform.

Ads Are Not Bad, Implementation Is The Problem

I actively read crypto stories from media websites like cointelegraph.com and I see a lot of ads. Whilst I primarily use Brave browser, which has ad blocking features, I most times do not use this feature while browsing cointelegraph.

Why?

The hate towards ads stems primarily from how several medium and small media websites have abused users by making content on their pages difficult to access without seeing hundreds of ads at the most annoying places.

It's never about the products or services being advertised but how a platform implements ads on its pages. In the case of cointelegraph, the popular crypto media website doesn't implement ads from third-party providers like Google, nor the giant's competitors. Rather, cointelegraph appears to natively serve their ads from an in-house developed ad system, in addition, most of their ad materials seems to also be customized to fit the design of their web pages, giving users unique experience viewing the content their interested in and also finding offers they may need served respectfully across the content of the site's pages.

Evidently, this works as cointelegraph’s ad pricing is one of the largest in the space as their implementation increases the visibility of partner products and services unlike with the case of Google ads where the poor implementation in sites could lead to several “unintended clicks” and general annoyance towards the products and services being promoted.

Subscriptions are cool, but not sustainable

We need ads because they are revenue drivers. Having external cash flow means being able to shield against inflation tokens and general market pressure.

Surely, subscriptions are great to generate revenue, but they shouldn't be a replacement for ads as that isn't a sustainable approach.

If we take a step back and look at the digital space, we would figure that the market is vastly saturated, there's already so much to subscribe to and the average consumer isn't that rich.

There's Netflix, there's YouTube(video + music), there's the numerous large media sites, there's Telegram, and X, there's ChatGPT and it's competitors, and this is just me trying to focus on general purpose apps and services, if we begin to dig into niche spaces, you'd find that the burden is too much for the consumers.

So why should a social platform substitute ads for subscriptions when the odds are stacked up against it?

One would want to talk about a platform like Medium. Trust me, Medium is cool, but it's only a matter of time before it begins to need ads. The reason is quite simple: it has recently expanded its partner program, enabling far more countries to be able to earn from the content. This essentially means that the income pool will be split amongst far more people, making the average writer likely to feel dissatisfied by the income in comparison to the efforts put in.

I believe I once stumbled on a Medium competitor, I think it's Vocal.media and I don't think it's doing so great. Similarly, if web3 social platforms will have to cater to a global audience and enable anyone to monetize their content, ads will be a very much needed piece.

In all honesty, we've wasted user attention over the years and we can't afford to keep doing that. A combination of ads, subscriptions, and tokenized reward systems is something quite powerful and we owe it to ourselves to figure it out before someone else does.

Being a first mover is an underrated business advantage in the digital space.