I see my fair share of ridiculous ads, perhaps because I am involved in blockchain and crypto, and there's an almost automatic assumption these days that blockchain and crypto is associated with sketchy ”get rich quick programs.
Recently I saw something claiming that you can "make thousands of dollars a month just from walking."
As always, the ads are somewhat hyped in their tone and the business model doesn't actually seem to have anything to do with you getting paid for walking, but for being served endless advertising while you're walking.
The first thing that comes to mind about this whole thing is how we are talking about web3 and crypto/blockchain being the next iteration of how we do things; the new generation of how we do business.
And yet?
So many of these businesses that hold themselves forward to be part of the new web3 movement are actually relying entirely on the *conventional model of generating revenue by selling advertising.
That's a bit depressing.
The whole thing sounds a little bit scammy to me, along with the proliferation of little bot games that allegedly will allow you to get paid to play.
Of course, apologists for the web3 movement tend to stand up and talk about how we are "reinventing how people make money," and we are reinventing the marketplace.
I don't have any doubts that you might be reinventing the logistics and physical characteristics of the marketplace, but a market is still a market. At least, I'd like to think so.
A market involves trading something for something. I have apples and you have paint and we trade. Likely, we have a medium of exchange because you don't always need apples to make a pie at the same time as I need to use paint. That medium of exchange might be fiat, crypto or bottle caps for all I care.
The thing a lot of people - and the world of web three - seem to believe is that we can somehow take something that has no value and declare that it has value. Which, from where I'm sitting, looks ever so much like ”money for nothing.”
So then we get back to the beginning of this whole line of thinking, and trying to figure out why it is that somebody walking around in a circle - which in the past might have been seen as a sign of insanity - now suddenly is supposed to have value, and warrant getting paid for.
From time to time we talk about the so-called "attention economy." If I can get you to pay attention to something, it has value. Whereas that is a nice theory we still need to look at why it has value.
Which brings us right back to advertising. Getting "paid to play" has value because it provides somebody with a captive audience to receive a sales pitch. This, in turn, is not very different from what we already had back in the late 1990s where people would get paid to watch commercials online.
Of course it was typically a model that failed because the revenue generated was seldom enough to get anybody to actually watch the commercials and the people who are watching commercials purely for money were seldom very good consumers because their motivation wasn't to find a product, but to get paid.
So I don't know where this whole thing's gonna end, but for now I'm mostly going to watch from the sidelines and see how the circus unfolds!
Thanks for stopping by the blog, and have a great weekend!
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Created at 2024-08-18 01:43 PDT
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