DILLER, on @CNBC: "At Expedia, we spend $5 billion in advertising every year. We won't spend ONE billion this year. .. You just writ that across everything, there you are."$EXPE
— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) April 16, 2020
To a great degree this is just "accelerating a trend" as they say, but the ad-supported internet is gonna be mostly dead. A lot of reasons for that but the simplest story is that google and facebook and amazon ate it all, and is true enough. Amazon's slashing their affiliate commissions (which were actually generous for a long time), facebook has never "shared" revenue except for with big media sites they kept conning (remember the pivot to video! heckuva job, website CEOs), and google is less and less focused on their "run ads on other sites" model daily.
I postponed my SPRING FUNDRAISING FUNSTRAVAGANZA last month for the obvious reasons, but life goes on. Been shifting away from ad revenue to reader revenue steadily for years and there isn't going to be much of the former anymore. So if this is fun for you and keeps you entertained consider giving me some of your NPR or cocktail or fancy night out money or whatever. Mostly this is fun, but occasionally we save the world just a little bit. Big donations, small donations, recurring donations, it's all good. The dream of everyone who has ever had a site is always "if everyone who reads regularly just pays a little bit..." which remains true. Your charity budget and "gotta keep yourself alive" budget should go to those things, but that movie theater ticket money isn't getting spent at the moment.
And happy blogiversary to us all, and to all a happy blogiversary!
18 effing years.