signulll: The Essence of Advertising Mechanisms Enhances Service Accessibility
signulll stated in a public discussion that advertising is an important economic mechanism for enhancing service accessibility, allowing users who cannot pay to access services, and emphasized that "good advertising" should complement rather than interfere with user experience.
This viewpoint echoes the long-standing practices of internet business models. English media and research generally point out that from Google searches to Meta's information streams, and from YouTube to TikTok, the core funding source for large-scale free services relies on advertising systems, achieving implicit subsidies for users through "attention monetization." At the same time, the improvement in advertising precision has continuously increased the monetization efficiency per user, thereby supporting the free provision of more complex and high-cost products.
However, controversies surrounding the advertising model persist. Several English policy and academic studies indicate that highly personalized advertising relies on data collection and behavioral tracking, leading to issues such as privacy concerns, information manipulation, and increased market concentration, making advertising not only an economic mechanism but also an important component of platform power structures.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
The essence of advertising is a "cross-subsidy mechanism": advertisers pay fees to replace users in bearing service costs, thereby expanding demand-side scale. This mechanism is particularly effective in digital products where marginal costs approach zero, as adding new users incurs almost no cost but can enhance advertising inventory and data value.
However, this "accessibility enhancement" is not unconditional; it relies on the platform's concentrated control over user attention and data. While users receive free services, they also relinquish behavioral data and cognitive pathways, transforming advertising from a mere commercial tool into a core power structure for resource allocation and information distribution.
With the introduction of AI, advertising is shifting from "matching demand" to "shaping demand." The combination of generative content and personalized recommendations allows advertising to be embedded within the content itself rather than as an external insertion. This will further improve conversion efficiency but also blur the boundaries between content and advertising, altering users' judgment mechanisms regarding information authenticity.
From a broader economic structure perspective, the advertising model reinforces the "free + scale + data" platform path, concentrating the market towards a few entities that possess traffic and data. This concentration increases resource allocation efficiency on one hand, while on the other hand exacerbating asymmetries in pricing power and distribution rights, which is one of the core structural tensions in the digital economy.