Ads Killed Social Media
Why So Many Ads
This morning I was trying to watch YouTube. I usually put something on to listen to while I am drawing. Maybe one day it’s the news just to get an update about the happenings around the world. Other days it’s art stuff, and other days it’s people I think are entertaining.
I totally get the need to monetize and make money. I get how things are now, everyone is trying to make a living yet lately, every time I want to watch something on YouTube it’s ad after ad. I am trying to watch a video but instead I am being inundated by so many ads:
AI ads, AI Codex, Tai Chi (also AI app), lose weight, monetize your website, let AI create a website for you, Let Codex do it for you, use AI to make a functional website, you can lose weight with this new weightless drug or herbal supplement that the doctors don’t want you to know about, achieve real success with just a few clicks and you don’t even need a following…
It’s like new pharmaceutical ads and political ads but now it’s AI. It just doesn’t go away.
It’s not like I haven’t been shown ads or commercials for the entirety of my life, but the amount of them is ridiculous. There’s almost no point to social media anymore because it’s all ads.
I wonder how creators feel when they are losing views because of it?
Almost everything you see, watch or read is a distortion or has a hidden agenda. News does not just report news. Yes, reporting just the facts can be boring but at least it’s just the facts. Why the unnecessary commentary and opinions that push views into believing things the way they want you to?
Everything is a miracle drug, a conspiracy, political outrage, virtue signaling, etc. But let’s not forget the importance of thin media. Lose weight, eat better, get more exercise (using these proven cheats in as little as 10 minutes a day), and GLP-1 or whatever it’s called, get you some Ozempic, or maybe they just go straight to the heart of it and hit you with how you will die because you’re fat and everyone hates you type of stuff.
I mean, we all know by now how that kind of thing doesn’t make people suddenly see the light, turn to Jesus, and come out looking like a Kardashian after 25 surgeries and still eating Carl’s Jr.
Sameness
Haven’t you noticed that people keep repeating the same things? We do or should know by now how scripted these seemingly “average” people are. They trend so hard it’s unfathomable that people don’t notice that “I am throwing this away” is the new click bait to get you to buy the same thing at a cheaper price because it’s just another POD brand competing with their foes selling the same POD or Drop Ship fast crap.
The difference between some truly small-time business and these big businesses portraying themselves as regular people who “broke free of the 200-view jail”, used [fill in POD company here], and are now making over six figures a year all because [fill in blank] and it was so easy, is this…
Shady Drop Ship and POD Trash
In the past, they might have tried to hide the fact that they got commissions from their sponsors, but now they tell you they get commissions because they have to. What they leave out is that in order to make those POD or Drop Ship garbage brands a viable income, you must first have enough capital to fill the egregious amount of orders in an account to process the orders as they come in; otherwise, it doesn’t work.
Then, like any other pyramid scheme, they utilize ‘influencers’ to sell links to get people to sign up to these sites that promise success, get your emails, fuck up your orders, and forget to make it exceptionally clear that you must first buy a sample.
Now, of course, you need to know what you’re selling. Because what kind of person would sell merch sight unseen? Not you. Of course not you. You’re better than that, so you purchase a sample with your design on it. You get a slight discount. You are probably happy with that and decide to move forward in allowing the POD to fulfill your business material and shipping needs.
It seems like a huge win, but it’s not…
It’s not because first, these companies tell you that your orders are fulfilled through a network of print partnerships around the globe, and that is a more carbon-friendly way of doing business that really attracts eco-conscious people like myself. It’s easy to not really put two and two together on this because what you got is NOT expressly what your customer will get. They will get something similar, but you have no idea what the quality will be like because you don’t actually know where it will come from.
Then, after you have already made the first purchase and move ahead with the goal of using said company, you realize you cannot fulfill the orders because that comes right out of your bank account, so if you thought you could just fulfill as many orders that come in and the customer would pay directly for that, nope. You were wrong. Some people find out the hard way.
End of Business Close Out
Now, the new merchant finds themselves in a little bit of a pickle. They close shop and go back to doing business the good old-fashioned way but not before they already poured money into something that was never going to work for the majority of them in the first place. But trying to tell that to people who are desperate to compete… well. I get it. Hope always sells.
Manipulation is Big Business
The commodity is your attention. That is a saying that is repeated because it is true. Saying no to social media even though you are also fed up leaves people in a state of hopelessness (manufactured hopelessness, by the way) that you must use them if you have any chance of success.
Those who have found success are now finding out that easy money comes at a price. A price which usually means they will lose sponsorship if they don’t say what they need you to say, even if it means you will trade in your integrity to do it.
There are so many people I used to watch on YouTube that changed before my eyes. There are a lot of things I find interesting, so I have seen a lot of things, but the patterns always repeat. I have seen it so many times now that I just cannot unsee it anymore.
Sell Outs…
There are very few original YT creators that have managed to maintain their integrity… so few. The majority of them I have seen morph into people that don’t even look the same. I am not talking about them just getting older but getting surgeries, losing so much weight that you know it is not healthy, trading in their logic for cocaine and accepting guns as gifts from other creators that I would NEVER watch because I know what they are about and I don’t like them.
Happens all the time now. So instead of it just being Hollywood where people sell their souls or get buried, it’s across all social platforms. If you happened to maintain your humanity, integrity, and authenticity, congratulations. Not having a following is not the end of the world. Making a couple of sales a year if you are lucky, through honest work and ethics, is incredible.
People Will Truly Tire of it One Day
It may not be anytime soon, but the era of social media is dying. I genuinely believe that with all the corporate overreach invading spaces, people will truly just walk away from it and find other places.
What I think that actually means is, while “they” are trying to tell you that websites and blogs are meaningless now, nothing could be further from the truth. They will make a comeback because people do want autonomy over what they do, what they say, what they write, what they believe, and they do want control over who sees, whom they attract, who they can block, ban, or what kinds of things they want to sell without having to give a huge chunk of it to the same entities that will just shut them off if they don’t comply.
It’s not a bad bet to think that in the coming years, blogging and websites will once again become relevant. Some people will find success in having a strictly e-commerce sales page, others will go back to having websites completely dedicated to cooking (used to love those), whatever you want to do, you can have that space.
Perhaps the cost of buying domains and websites hosting will increase (it already has since I first started blogging back in 2005) because they always want a cut, and they do provide an actually valuable service that most of us couldn’t do by ourselves, but the trade-off is that you get to be you. You know, the way that YouTube used to be. You get to watch what you want to watch, see who you want to see, etc.
Perhaps we can go back to using RSS feeds so we can see who we want and not whatever is fed to us. IDK, but from the way things are going, it really does make sense that the next era will be a little bit of a jump back to before “they” broke the internet.
Now getting people to those websites.. that’s another issue but I am sure there is a solution.