From the New York Times (link courtesy of Freakonomics) comes news that advertising is going to get even more annoyingly aggressive (and aggressively annoying):
Newspapers, magazines and Web sites are so crowded with ads for entertainment programming that CBS was ready to try something different, Mr. Schweitzer said. The best thing about the egg concept was its intrusiveness.
They have borrowed a page from the affiliate-marketing ad-network model so annoyingly common on today’s websites:
Egg producers, distributors and retailers all share in the ad revenue.
Obviously this kind of business model works in the short-term because it addresses a perceived inefficiency in the market (”education” of uninformed but willing customers). However, in the limit, it is unfriendly to consumers: in the advertiser’s perfect world, everyone would shop via affiliate or ad-network links; prices would then ultimately simply rise across the board to cover these costs. In the end, some extra money simply gets transferred from the consumer to the ad network or affiliate marketer.
The only party being conspicuously left out of this ad-revenue-sharing plan is the consumer. This is similar to the entrenchment of credit cards: people who pay with cash subsidize the merchants’ costs of accepting credit card purchases from people paying via credit card (although the cash-users do get to live off the grid).
In both cases, the merchant maintains a status quo, a middleman makes money, and the consumer pays more.
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