We should think about the advertising model before its too late and it gets shoved onto us. I think each community should get its own advertiser and they get a stick post on each post which is limited to 300 chars and one url.
Its simple, non intrusive and we can make it a bidding. 80 % of the proceeds should go to the maintenance of the instance, 20 % should go to the moderators of the instance.
Would warner brothers want this for 100 $ on movies ? I think so …
Absolutely. But most businesses don’t have the wherewithal to hire impartial analysts and statisticians to evaluate the effectiveness of their ad buys. They have to rely on a combination of intuition, customer feedback, but mostly on outside advertising professionals, and those professionals have every incentive to maintain the impression that spending more on advertising it the best decision.
You are absolutely right. There’s clearly a conflict of interest. I also have a feeling that companies buying advertising services don’t really know what they’re buying, what they’re supposed to get, what they could be getting in the best case scenario etc.