Ev Williams

Danny in the Valley · Twitter co-founder Ev Williams: “You’re selling attention”

• What Is New About the Ad Business Today

  Brands used to buy ads in relation to the content in which their ads were shown. Now they are simply placing a purchase order for eyeballs, regardless of where those ads show up.

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• What Is Driving Proliferation of Fake News

  On one hand, we have ad driven systems, like Facebook, Google Twitter ...etc. The ads displayed on those systems are paying for the systems that provide service for the people. In this case, the companies are selling the services, and funding them via the ads. These ads are okay.

  On the other hand though, we have ad-driven content. This content is driven by profit directly from the people clicking on those headlines. The catchier the content, the more money they make. [Fake news is driven by the latter]

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• How Valuable Is Content on the Internet

  Clicks and view counts on the internet measure attention, but they cannot measure the value of content to the person consuming it. Worthless clickbait might appear more valuable than an article worth your full attention.

  To fix this, Medium introduced a "clap," a variable measure of value that signals not just desire, but the level of value a piece of content delivers to its reader. It's the source of data that was not possible to get anywhere else.

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• Will People Ever Pay for Content

  People will pay for things, and they demonstrate that in all kinds of markets, media and otherwise, people pay for higher quality content. People pay for convenience, people pay for identity...etc.

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• Can Ads Alone Fund High Quality Publishing?

  No. In the world of publishing, there are no absolutes, but in general there will be free content focused on mass distribution, with low cost production powered by advertising, and then there will be higher production value, higher costs content which will need to be paid for by consumer support.

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• Has Internet Gone Too Far

  According to Ev Williams, the founder of Blogger and Twitter, the Internet now is much more reflective of the real world than the internet 20 years ago, when he was getting started. Now, the internet actually has all the people of the world.

  When things were small, they were manageable. The bad actors did not get the momentum to share their ideas. The networks were also less connected and lest immediate so there wasn't a potential for abuse. The internet 20 years ago did not have the impact on what people read and believed in, how they voted.

  Now that everything is so intertwined, there are all these new problems to be solved.

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