Alex Pooley’s Blog

Advertising on the web has become as common as half baked reality TV shows. The value of ads to us is indirect via the sponsorship of free content. But what about if advertising started directly subsidising your Internet connection, or your ultra expensive iPhone/mobile data connection? This complex intersection of business models could be the Achilles Heel of online advertising.

Current online advertisers make cash by having publishers whack ads on their page on behalf of the advertising agency (Google, Chitika, etc). But what happens when you shift the advertising up stream, closer to the source of the connection? More specifically, what happens when you move the advertising platform to your Internet Service Provider?

Let’s say you browse a page, and your ISP swaps Google’s ads for their own. Suddenly your ISP has an extra stream of revenue, and online advertisers start losing out. Sure, there’s privacy and legal issues here, but it’s quite plausible. After all, if I can install a Firefox extension to block ads, then why can’t I use an ISP that swaps ads?

I wrote this post in response to this post on GigaOm. There’s a few other links in that post if you want to follow up on this. Apparently this business model is already being tested in the UK and US.

Will Google – that massive one trick pony – continue to dominate, or will the black swan be sighted sooner rather than later?