I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet.
It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here.
Can someone explain to me what the problem is? Honest question. Thanks.
Ads are bringing so little revenue per user that I can't see how that can possibly be true. And even then people are paying the ads on the product they end up buying after.
Ads function at a macro economic level like a very inefficient tax scheme.
Here's a video [1] by a reasonably successful YouTube guitarist, Samurai Guitarist, on the various ways a professional guitarist might make money and how effective they are. It includes a section on content creators for social media.
The content creator part is what is relevant for this thread, but the whole video is worth watching if you are at all curious what a working musician who is not a big name star might make.
He gives some numbers from back when he was at around 50k followers, after two years of working full time trying to turn content creator into something he could make a living from.
He was getting $500/month from AdSense.
He was also getting about $500 for sponsored videos but he only had sponsors occasionally. He wasn't focused on something specialized gear reviews which would have probably gotten more sponsorships, so the sponsors were more general like VPN companies or game companies.
Patreon was around $300/month.
Amazon affiliate links to products he mentioned were around $50/month.
Spotify and other streaming services that he uploaded his music to were about $30/month.
He'd promote in his YouTube videos giving guitar lessons over Skype. That brought in around $750/month.
Fiverr gigs ranged from $80-500/month.
All in all a good month would be around $3000 at 50k followers.