Companies participating in the consumer technology market have to generate revenue in one or a combination of these four ways:

• Charging users for hardware
• Charging users for services
• Charging users for software
• Charging advertisers for eyeballs.

If you don’t make hardware, then you’re limited to the other three options. The vast majority of companies that fall into that category are opting for the last option, because it lowers the barriers to entry for users, but perhaps also because it allows those seeking funding to avoid the difficult question of revenue generation until they have an audience.

The assumption seems to be that, as long as you have eyeballs, you can find a way to turn those into advertising dollars. And that’s true to a certain extent, but the ability of different consumer services companies to make money from advertising depends varies very greatly, in a way that is rarely talked about. This has come up a bit recently in the context of Spotify, because the ephemerality of the content is supposedly poorly suited to advertising. But there’s a much bigger problem that affects not just Snapchat but also many others in the current crop of messaging and photo sharing companies, which is that they know almost nothing about their users that’s relevant to advertisers. Continue reading →