I am currently setting up an E-commerce store and that made me think…
Since a lot of E-commerce is powered by targeted ads, how would this work if we can’t target ads to anyone on the SAFE Network since we don’t know anything about them?
E-commerce is a large part of the internet and is mandatory for many businesses. If the SAFE Network wants to be the new internet, I believe there has to be a way for businesses to advertise their items to interested customers.
So my question is, how would businesses successfully sell items on the SAFE Network?
I hope someone has already thought of a solution to this.
Buisnsses will have to invent new …buisness models !
First, not being able to agressively push targeted ads to barely consentent people, doesn’t mean that you can’t politely propose and win their consent, and serve them ads that they welcome.
A company that has a really good product should be able to earn that trust easily.
Not being able to target ads doesn’t mean no advertising at all , either. It has been the case for several centuries that advertising was non or almost non targeted , that didn’t prevent people to publish ads and successfully win their markets.
Targeting has been done for decades towards groups instead of individuals : you would publish an ad for mountain shoes in a mountaining magazine.
Nothing prevents marketers from being creative on Safe.
My opinion is that invasive targeted advertising is a furuncle that needs to be cured from our society, and what Safe can prevent, is marketers to believe they can act without due respect for those who make them live.
Companies and marketing boards will have to learn to behave, say hello, quit reading people’s mail, and act with responsability. Those with good , solid products who will learn how to do that, have nothing to fear of Safe, and will be the winners.
Those who will strive to keep on polluting people’s minds and try to disrespectfully brute force crappy products into their customers brains, will vanish.
Ads can be useful in some situations, and when they are non-intrusive I am a supporter of that but advertising on the web has often become too much of an annoyance in recent years. It’s a too much of a one-size-tries-to-fit all solution that is becoming a bit dinosaurish. Just look at Google Search where companies pay huge ad costs just to make sure they are on top of the search results for their brands. That’s a bit over the top frankly.
So I think new business models will emerge on the SAFE network that are smarter ways of matching sellers and customers than the usual ad-driven approach.
Suppose there was no advertising, just you me and everyone else sharing what we like and dislike with our friends, colleagues etc.
Do you think there would be difficulty selling a good product that people find useful?
It actually makes it easier for good products to get known, especially from small innovators, because they don’t have to fight to get heard against lots of inferior stuff backed by greater marketing budgets (clever targeting, expensive ad campaigns etc).
It would also be more efficient, not wasting as much money selling rubbish leaves more for the other areas of a business (customer support, people, product development etc).
We certainly do not need to worry about replicating traditional business models on SAFEnetwork. If we have users with SafeCoin to spend, businesses will arrive and adapt their model to provide products and services to those users.
In fact, the difference and the scarcity of sellers on a new and growing platform is a great opportunity for any new business to build a new market and create new customer relationships while the market is wide open.
So I expect plenty of innovative businesses to be keen to get going on SAFE, while more traditional sellers will come later once the innovators have shown the way.
If you don’t want to see ads, you can just turn it off or have an family picture on the background.
Even if you don’t want to see ads, you can receive ad revenue from the ad platform through our token. Although my first project is an ad platform, I HATE tracking and even ads, because they are annoying. Still I think this project can help me incredibly to promote the SAFE Network, I can pitch it as the self-serve ad service that pays out ad money to it’s users. And it’s pretty simple how I can promote the SAFE Network:
A more elegant way of advertising is affiliate marketing, for example: if I wrote an article about SAFEcoin and a developer reads about this, why it is incredibly useful for developers to cut costs by uploading their app to the SAFE Network. If I include an affiliate link to buy SAFEcoins from an online store in such an setting, I think it benefit are 3 parties involved.
With the SAFE Network they get one business models for free, farming.
Yeah you can pay with Clikes to promote your content to a group of people.
What I’m more worried on the SAFE Network, is the permission that these apps will get to allow them to do things like this:
Just having the SAFE Network is not enough, we need to do a lot of education and transparancy…
It would also help if every SAFE project is opensourced from the get go and shared with as many people/devs as possible.
Someone is going to make a system for targeted ads, that’s a given pretty much.
What they can’t do is track users without consent.
Every site that used a tracker would have to ask the user for permission to track them. They’d have to show one of those permission dialog that apps show.
I suppose some sites will give users the option of either being tracked and use for free or paying, while others will let users in even if they don’t consent to being tracked. The market will decide which models will survive.
At least people can’t be forcibly tracked without consent like on the current web and I think that’s the most important thing.
I guess people could also “cheat” the trackers to access content for free by making new ids.
Well, PDC become Clikes and Clikes are a way to pay to traverse the web-of-trust, as I understand it, so that marketeers can reach users on SAFE social networks - although they can also be blocked if they annoy anyone so they must be careful.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I got rid of my TV in 2000 in favour of a large monitor so I could watch media with no adverts. I moved to the welsh wilderness to get away form the bombardments of advertising and commercial living in London. I don’t use fb and I would rather suffer inconvenience and limited functionality than be tracked by companies. When SAFE is up I will try to leave the legacynet behind as quickly as possible and I will be very happy not to be mind-raped by maketeers who want to shove their consumerist totems under my nose every 5 seconds.
I guess @intrz does have a point though and most people are not like me. Some sites will require tracking and some users will be ok with that. That’s fine. Thankfully the paradigm shift does not require established business models to agree or sign up for SAFE, it’s coming with or without them. If they want to reach the people on it they will have to adapt to it, SAFE won’t need to adapt to their needs and practices in order to attract them.
I would rather suffer inconvenience and limited functionality than be tracked
Indeed. I also left city life for backcountry , for the same reasons. Don’t have fb , twitter or instafame either, and will be very happy to be able to peacefully, privately read and share enlightning ad free content on Safe when its up, would it be paid, monochrome, text only , @56 bauds.
Now I do think we are from a rather rare species ( waves to @jabba and others ) , and do think it is important that consented advertising can exist on Safe for those who want it, those who need it for a living, and for the health of the Safe economy. As long as I can opt out.
